Tropical systems host the world’s largest biodiversity and represent major contributors to global biogeochemical cycles. However, they are particularly threatened by global change, and an urgent goal for ecologists is to decipher the mechanisms generating the highly diverse tropical communities so as to improve predictions of the future of these ecosystems. Disentangling the mechanisms shaping community assembly and dynamics requires going beyond purely taxonomic approaches, and recent advances have integrated species traits to evaluate how variation in functional strategies influence species performance and distribution. The aim of this symposium is to gather insights from trait-based approaches across the tropics to evaluate the role of species functional differences in shaping community assembly and dynamics in tropical systems. The symposium will offer a broad range of perspectives and approaches, from local to regional, in undisturbed and disturbed systems, spanning contrasted environments and different continents. It will provide critical insights to better understand the functional proxies of community assembly and dynamics, and promising way forward to improve predictions of the future of tropical systems with ongoing global change.