ABSTRACTThis special issue of the Brazilian Journal of Plant Physiology provides new insights into how cerrado plants cope with various demands imposed by the environment. They also explore the mechanisms of physiological adaptations at different scales and draw attention to the importance of phenotypic plasticity in plant adaptation to the cerrado environment. Most of them are not reviews but rather a series of case studies. Each presents new information or adds new approaches and analyses of already published data sets. Together they represent the opinions of scientists with diverse expertise working at different levels of organization (organism, population, community and ecosystem) and temporal and spatial scales on cerrado ecophysiology.