Differentiable land model reveals global environmental controls on latent ecological functions

The spatial distributions of plant functional traits observed today are living imprints of current environmental gradients and past selection, offering insight into how plants have adapted to their environments. What remains insufficiently understood is how traits combine and coordinate across environments, and whether such coordination reflects organizing principles in ecology that can improve modeling of ecosystem functional diversity and decadal-scale carbon exchange. Here we present DifferLand, a differentiable hybrid model that learns high-dimensional, coordinated environment-trait relationships directly from multi-modal satellite and in situ observations. DifferLand reveals a small number of latent axes that represent how suites of plant traits jointly shape vegetation dynamics and carbon-water fluxes, enabling the model to capture both long-term adaptation patterns and short-term responses to meteorological variability, and to outperform models that rely solely on plant functional types in spatial generalization. The spatialization network learns nonlinear interactions between plant functional attributes and environmental gradients, organizing latent ecological parameters that represent functional traits at the global scale. This latent environment-trait structure reveals large-scale patterns of ecosystem functional diversity and improves the spatial generalization of terrestrial biosphere models.