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The physical structure of vegetation is thought to be closely related to ecosystem function, but little is known of its pertinence across geographic regions. Here, we used data from over three million trees in continental North America to evaluate structural diversity – the volumetric capacity and physical arrangement of biotic components in ecosystems – as a predictor of productivity. We show that structural diversity is a robust predictor of forest productivity and consistently outperforms the traditional measure – species diversity – across climate conditions in North America. Moreover, structural diversity appears to be a better surrogate of niche occupancy because it captures variation in size that can be used to measure realized niche space. Structural diversity offers an easily measured metric to direct restoration and management decision making to maximize ecosystem productivity and carbon sequestration. 

Ecologists—especially those new to the field—are tasked with finding relevant literature matching their research interests and deciding upon a suitable venue for the publication of their work. To provide a roadmap for early career researchers to identify journals aligned with their interests, we analyzed major research themes found across the top 30 ecology journals and three high‐impact multi‐disciplinary journals (Nature, PNAS,andScience), utilizing an automated content analysis (ACA) of 84,841 article abstracts, titles, and author keywords published over the last four decades. Journals clustered into 10 distinct groups based on 46 research themes identified byACA. We examined the frequency of ecological themes in each of these journal groups to identify the journals most associated with each theme. We found three themes (anthropogenic impacts, disease,andtraits) that occurred at a high frequency in the high‐impact multi‐disciplinary journal group containingNature, PNAS,andScience. Themes that increased in frequency over the last four decades, such asclimate change, traits, anthropogenic, andcellular biology, were found more often in journals with higher impact factors, indicating that emerging research themes in ecology will likely become of interest to a broader readership over time. Our study provides a thematic review as a potential roadmap for junior ecologists to browse and publish journal articles.