1 Introduction

Plant functional traits are the features (morphological, physiological, phenological) that represent ecological strategies and determine describe? how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels and influence ecosystem properties. Variation in plant functional traits, and trait syndromes, has proven useful for tackling many important ecological questions at a range of scales, giving rise to a demand for standardized ways to measure ecologically meaningful plant traits. The importance of these topics dictates the urgent need for more and better data, and increases the value of standardized protocols for quantifying trait variation of different species, in particular for traits with power to predict plant- and ecosystem-level processes, and for traits that can be measured relatively easily (Pérez-Harguindeguy et al., 2013)

This handbook presents the different protocols used in EcoFoG’s ecophysio lab. We therefore suggest the methodological principles for a more open and transparent science. This handbook not only includes updated methods for the trait measurements, but also includes the excel worksheets for data collection and links toward detailed tutorial or user’s guide for all methods used in this lab. This handbook will be associated with an R package EcophyCofog containing some useful homemade functions to deal with some devices output.