A note on functional diversity measures

By Carlo Ricotta. 2005

233 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Functional diversity (FD) has been seen as the key to understanding ecosystem processes, such as productivity, nutrient cycling and storage, carbon sequestration, and stability to perturbations. Yet it is still unclear how FD should be measured. In this paper, I propose a set of fundamental criteria that a meaningful index of FD should satisfy to reasonably behave in ecological research. If FD is computed from the pairwise functional distances among the species of a given assemblage, the candidate measures should be set monotone, monotone in distance, and should conform to the twinning property. On the other hand, if FD is computed taking into account both the pairwise functional distances among species and their relative abundances, the candidate measure should be concave, thus allowing additive diversity decomposition into α- β- and γ-terms. Conformity to the above requirements may be beneficial for selecting a family of measures that are most appropriate for a correct evaluation of the relations between biological diversity and ecosystem functioning.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c1a684e4f35d835250c8af1f9374816601060e3

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In Ecology

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Assessment of ecosystem function following marine aggregate dredging (2008, background): “has been gaining credibility as an efficient functional diversity index (Petchey & Gaston, 2002; Mason et al., 2003; Ricotta, 2005 ).”
Quantifying and interpreting functional diversity of natural communities: practical considerations matter (2006, methodology): “Recently, several methods have been described and discussed on how to calculate the functional diversity (Mason et al. 2003, 2005, Botta-Dukát 2005, Ricotta 2005, Petchey & Gaston 2006, de Bello et al. 2006).”
Functional diversity: a review of methodology and current knowledge in freshwater macroinvertebrate research (2016, background): “…a wide variety of conceptual and methodological definitions (Petchey et al., 2004; Botta-Dukát, 2005; Mason et al., 2005; Mouillot et al., 2005; Ricotta, 2005; Petchey & Gaston, 2006; Ricotta & Moretti, 2008; Villéger et al., 2008; Poos et al., 2009; Laliberté & Legendre, 2010; Mouchet et al.,…”
Dendrograms and measuring functional diversity (2007, background): “total branch length of trees if used as a measure of FD does not satisfy the set monotonicity property (Ricotta 2005) .”
Global legume diversity assessment: Concepts, key indicators, and strategies (2013, background): “Other useful measures include functional richness (Cornwell & al., 2006) and Rao’s quadratic entropy (Rao, 1982; Ricotta, 2005).”
A measure for assessing functional diversity in ecological communities (2009, methodology): “This property was achieved by applying FUs (or functional species sensu Ricotta 2005).”
Assessing functional diversity in the field - methodology matters! (2007, background): “Functional diversity can be quantified using a variety of indices that capture different aspects of the distribution of trait values within a community (see recent reviews by Bótta-Dukàt 2005; Ricotta 2005; Petchey & Gaston 2006).”
Long-term erosion of tree reproductive trait diversity in edge-dominated Atlantic forest fragments (2009, background): “Evenness-based indices for estimating functional diversity has been frequently recommended (see Petchey and Gaston, 2002; Petchey et al., 2004; Ricotta, 2005).”
Which trait dissimilarity for functional diversity: trait means or trait overlap? (2013, background): “beta diversity) further requires that a set properties of trait dissimilarity are fulfilled (Ricotta 2005).”
A user's guide to functional diversity indices (2010, methodology): “Some properties of selected indices were specified by Petchey and Gaston (2006) and Ricotta (2005), but new indices have been published since then (e.g., Cornwell et al. 2006, Podani and Schmera 2007, Villéger et al. 2008) and although the importance of intraspecific specialization and variability…”
A macroecological perspective of trait patterns in stream communities (2013, methodology): “This index uses abundance data and quantifies the average distance between two randomly selected individuals from the community (Ricotta, 2005).”
Partitioning of functional diversity reveals the scale and extent of trait convergence and divergence (2009, methodology): “If we calculate FD, the Rao index indicates the expectation of trait dissimilarity between two randomly chosen individuals in a community (Ricotta 2005; Lepš et al. 2006).”
Marine benthic ecological functioning over decreasing taxonomic richness (2015, unknown): “This way of calculating FD accounts for species number as there is a starting dendrogram derived from all taxa, and reductions in taxa decrease or leave the total remaining branch lengths unchanged (Podani and Schmera, 2006; Ricotta, 2005).”
On dendrogram-based measures of functional diversity (2006, unknown): “The measurement of functional diversity (FD) has been in the focus of ecological research for several years (Tilman 2001, Mason et al. 2003, 2005, Naeem and Wright 2003, Petchey et al. 2004, Botta-Dukát 2005, Mouillot et al. 2005, Ricotta 2005).”