The widely established CSR-model quantitatively groups plants according to their ecological response, i.e. competitiveness, stress-toleration and ruderality. These plant strategies are allocated using plant traits. We assess the potential of canopy traits derived by imaging spectroscopy and inverted radiative transfer models for allocating CSR-scores. Our findings indicate that plant traits (LAI, Cab, Car and SLA) are valuable `soft traits’ to map plant strategies.