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Tracking biodiversity across biomes over space and time has emerged as an imperative in unified global efforts to manage our living planet for a sustainable future for humanity. We harness the National Ecological Observatory Network to develop routines using airborne spectroscopic imagery to predict multiple dimensions of plant biodiversity at continental scale across biomes in the US. Our findings show strong and positive associations between diversity metrics based on spectral species and ground-based plant species richness and other dimensions of plant diversity, whereas metrics based on distance matrices did not. We found that spectral diversity consistently predicts analogous metrics of plant taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic dimensions of biodiversity across biomes. The approach demonstrates promise for monitoring dimensions of biodiversity globally by integrating ground-based measures of biodiversity with imaging spectroscopy and advances capacity toward a Global Biodiversity Observing System. 

Reflectance spectra provide integrative measures of plant phenotypes by capturing chemical, morphological, anatomical and architectural trait information. Here, we investigate the linkages between plant spectral variation, and spectral and resource-use complementarity that contribute to ecosystem productivity. In both a forest and prairie grassland diversity experiment, we delineated n -dimensional hypervolumes using wavelength bands of reflectance spectra to test the association between the spectral space occupied by individual plants and their growth, as well as between the spectral space occupied by plant communities and ecosystem productivity. We show that the spectral space occupied by individuals increased with their growth, and the spectral space occupied by plant communities increased with ecosystem productivity. Furthermore, ecosystem productivity was better explained by inter-individual spectral complementarity than by the large spectral space occupied by productive individuals. Our results indicate that spectral hypervolumes of plants can reflect ecological strategies that shape community composition and ecosystem function, and that spectral complementarity can reveal resource-use complementarity.