Unifying functional trait approaches to understand the assemblage of ecological communities: synthesizing taxonomic divides

By K. C. Weiss, C. Ray. Ecography, 2019

91 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Functional traits have long been considered the ‘holy grail’ in community ecology due to their potential to link phenotypic variation with ecological processes. Advancements across taxonomic disciplines continue to support functional ecology's objective to approach generality in community assembly. However, a divergence of definitions, aims and methods across taxa has created discord, limiting the field's predictive capacity. Here, we provide a guide to support functional ecological comparisons across taxa. We describe advances in cross‐taxa functional research, identify gaps in approaches, synthesize definitions and unify methodological considerations. When deciding which traits to compare, particularly response traits, we advocate selecting functionally analogous traits that relate to community assembly processes. Finally, we describe at what scale and for which questions functional comparisons across taxa are useful and when other approaches may be more constructive. Our approach promotes standardized methods for integrative research across taxa to identify broad trends in community assembly.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/40a616279a9518ff2aedcc555752361e7d654490

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In Ecological Modeling

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

AVONET: morphological, ecological and geographical data for all birds. (2022, background): “Missing species in partially sampled trait datasets can radically alter the trait structure of communities and the fit of evolutionary models, reducing predictive power and restricting studies to a biased sample of well-known clades (Kohli & Jarzyna, 2021; Weiss & Ray, 2019).”
Global gaps in trait data for terrestrial vertebrates (2020, background): “There have been several calls to produce open-access, global trait datasets (Weiss & Ray, 2019), including a representation of intraspecific trait variation (Kissling et al., 2018).”