This video from the 6th Global Botanic Gardens Congress features Jeannine Cavender-Bares, a Professor at the University of Minnesota in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior and a Fellow at the Institute on Environment. She studies plant function and biodiversity, including its origins, maintenance and consequences and seeks to conserve and restore the Earth's biodiversity. Cavender-Bares is broadly interested in how functional traits of plants link evolutionary history to current ecological processes. Much of her team's work combines phylogenetic and quantitative genetic approaches with studies of plant physiological function to understand community assembly and the forces underlying shifts in stress tolerance among closely related species or among populations of the same species. Currently, she is leading an NSF and NASA funded Dimensions of Biodiversity project using remote sensing tools to remotely sense biodiversity, tree health and ecosystem processes. She has published over 100 scientific articles.