The origins of this Virtual Special Issue lie in a workshop titled Scaling Root Processes: Global Impacts, held in Washington, D.C. on March 7–9, 2012. The workshop was organized in response to the growing recognition of the importance of terrestrial ecosystems in the global carbon cycle and the need to improve model representations of carbon flow within ecosystems by bringing root functions into models.
Articles in this collection originate from the workshop discussions and the New Phytologist archive. The journal has a long history of publishing important work on root biology, particularly in relation to global change issues, and this collection serves to further enhance the understanding of root systems and their dynamic interactions with broader ecosystem-level processes.