On the challenge of treating various types of variables: application for improving the measurement of functional diversity

By Sandrine Pavoine, J. Vallet, A. Dufour, Sophie Gachet, H. Daniel. 2009

610 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/59fc6f2e93d495c51d6dc12502d05a084142b019

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Genetics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Global relationship of wood and leaf litter decomposability: the role of functional traits within and across plant organs (2014, methodology): “The ordinations were based on a generalization of Gower’s distance, which is suitable for the treatment of continuous and categorical variables and can accommodate missing data (Pavoine et al., 2009).”
How many dimensions are needed to accurately assess functional diversity? A pragmatic approach for assessing the quality of functional spaces (2015, background): “…distance (Gower, 1966) and the Global Ecology and Biogeography, 24, 728–740, © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 729 subsequent generalization proposed by Pavoine et al. (2009) can cope with all types of traits (i.e. traits coded as continuous, categorical, ordinal, circular or fuzzy variables),…”
Species contribute differently to the taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic alpha and beta diversity of freshwater fish communities (2014, methodology): “A dissimilarity matrix based on all ten traits was constructed using Gower’s coefficient, a metric able to accommodate nominal, ordinal, continuous and missing data (Pavoine et al., 2009).”
Measuring biodiversity to explain community assembly: a unified approach (2011, methodology): “In this vein, new indices could incorporate additional information that weights the relative importance of species abundances when measuring functional and phylogenetic diversity (see for instance Ricotta & Szeidl, 2006; Pavoine et al., 2009a).”
A guide for using functional diversity indices to reveal changes in assembly processes along ecological gradients (2013, methodology): “Although there is some debate about the appropriate dissimilarity measure to use in calculating Rao (de Bello et al. 2012), we use Gower distance, as recommended by Pavoine et al. (2009).”
A proposed unified terminology of species traits in stream ecology (2015, background): “DIFFICULTIES IN HANDLING ORDINAL-SCALE DATA The treatment of ordinal-scale variables poses difficulties in statistical analysis in general (Pavoine et al. 2009) and in stream ecology in particular.”
Which trait dissimilarity for functional diversity: trait means or trait overlap? (2013, background): “This is generally resolved by computing a pairwise species trait dissimilarity matrix (Pavoine et al. 2009; Laliberte & Legendre 2010), i. e. a matrix which contains the trait dissimilarity for each pair of species in a dataset.”
Evidence for scale‐ and disturbance‐dependent trait assembly patterns in dry semi‐natural grasslands (2013, background): “Because pairs of quantitative traits were mostly uncorrelated (the maximum Pearson correlation was 0.42), this approach generally corresponds to a multivariate measure of species dissimilarity accounting for multiple traits (Pavoine et al. 2009).”
Quantifying the relevance of intraspecific trait variability for functional diversity (2011, neutral): “…approaches, each quantitative trait is standardized by dividing the trait value by the range of possible values for this trait (which corresponds to the Gower distance based on one trait; see Botta-Dukat 2005 and Pavoine et al. 2009 also for standardizations based on other type of traits).”
Thresholds in the relationship between functional diversity and patch size for mammals in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (2015, methodology): “For the distance matrix construction we used the modified Gower’s distance (Pavoine et al., 2009) because it best matches the combination of categorical and continuous data, and unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic mean clustering (UPGMA), which together yielded dendrograms with good…”
Does pollen-assemblage richness reflect floristic richness? A review of recent developments and future challenges (2016, positive): “1208 Pavoine et al. (2009) extend Gower’s (1971) coefficient of similarity for mixed data to include new 1209 data types.”
A distance-based framework for measuring functional diversity from multiple traits. (2010, background): “For example, other dissimilarity measures can accommodate different types of variables and missing values (Estabrook and Rogers 1966, Pavoine et al. 2009).”
Desert-adapted species are vulnerable to climate change: Insights from the warmest region on Earth (2015, methodology): “To estimate the independent contributions of each biological trait to the global Gower’s distance, we correlated squared distance matrices for each trait with the global squared distance (Pavoine et al., 2009).”