Tropical forests ecosystems contain more than half of the world’s terrestrial diversity, and contribute more than a third of global terrestrial carbon stocks. This diversity is not only represented by the high number of animal and plant species, but also by the functional and structural trait variation and complexity of ecosystem processes. While traditional methods in ecology have been successful at gathering measurements of forest composition and structure, ecosystem processes, field-based studies have limited capacity to map landscape-level patterns and dynamics across large spatial extents. Remote-sensing methods have advanced rapidly to overcome these challenges and enable sampling the crowns of large canopy trees over expansive areas, measuring canopy chemistry and forest phenology, and estimating carbon biomass over large environmental gradients. Spatially continuous observations in high-diverse systems such as tropical forest are necessary to evaluate the ecosystem response to the different environmental threats such as land use disturbance and increases in drought intensity. Moreover, methods that allow mapping the chemical composition of tree species and forest structure will allow us to improve our knowledge on how changes in tree biodiversity impacts ecosystem processes and functions such as carbon dynamics and biogeochemical cycles. This symposium will illustrate how passive remote sensing can improve estimations of the spatial variation of plant trait diversity and measurements of traits related with carbon gain and capture of tropical tree species. It will also illustrate how methods of active remote sensing such as ground LiDAR can improve estimations of tropical forest structure in fragmented landscapes, quantification of architectural plant traits, and mensuration of the allometry and volume of woody plant species. Further, it will provide insights into how satellite data can improve our understanding of ecosystem functioning of tropical forests, and ecosystem responses to climate changes such as drought intensity. This symposium is comprehensive and provides insights at different organizational levels to scale-up organismal level traits and forest function from individuals to communities to ecosystems. Approaches that allow scaling-up traits and ecosystem function are highly needed tropical forests to improve the monitoring and conservation of tropical forest biodiversity. In addition, these approaches will evaluate the challenges and opportunities to characterize the next 10 years of tropical forest structure and function. Finally, the results of this interdisciplinary research will allow bridging the gap between field-based studies and earth system science to enhance our ability to predict tropical forest response to current and future global changes.