Scaling environmental change through the community‐level: a trait‐based response‐and‐effect framework for plants

By K. Suding, S. Lavorel, F. Chapin, J. H. C. Cornelissen, Sandra Díaz, Eric Garnier, D. Goldberg, David U Hooper, S. T. Jackson, M. Navas. 2008

873 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Predicting ecosystem responses to global change is a major challenge in ecology. A critical step in that challenge is to understand how changing environmental conditions influence processes across levels of ecological organization. While direct scaling from individual to ecosystem dynamics can lead to robust and mechanistic predictions, new approaches are needed to appropriately translate questions through the community level. Species invasion, loss, and turnover all necessitate this scaling through community processes, but predicting how such changes may influence ecosystem function is notoriously difficult. We suggest that community‐level dynamics can be incorporated into scaling predictions using a trait‐based response–effect framework that differentiates the community response to environmental change (predicted by response traits) and the effect of that change on ecosystem processes (predicted by effect traits). We develop a response‐and‐effect functional framework, concentrating on how the relationships among species' response, effect, and abundance can lead to general predictions concerning the magnitude and direction of the influence of environmental change on function. We then detail several key research directions needed to better scale the effects of environmental change through the community level. These include (1) effect and response trait characterization, (2) linkages between response‐and‐effect traits, (3) the importance of species interactions on trait expression, and (4) incorporation of feedbacks across multiple temporal scales. Increasing rates of extinction and invasion that are modifying communities worldwide make such a research agenda imperative.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef1a2cc82c7667cae34eb2770ad135a3ff502028

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In Ecological Modeling

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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Citations in the corpus

Resilience in ecology: Abstraction, distraction, or where the action is? (2014, background): “Increasingly, trait-based approaches are recognised for improving our understanding of ecosystem dynamics because they offer a more mechanistic understanding of ecosystems than stand-alone patterns of species diversity (Lavorel and Garnier, 2002; Suding et al., 2008).”
Morphological traits can track coral reef responses to the Anthropocene (2019, background): “Specifically, traits can be classified as being response and/or effect traits, where a response trait determines how organisms respond to change and an effect trait determines how an organism affects ecosystem processes (Suding et al., 2008).”
Effects of disturbance intensity on species and functional diversity in a tropical forest (2012, background): “Disturbance has direct effects by increasing resource availability or indirect effects through changes in community functional properties (Suding et al. 2008).”
The relationship between invader abundance and impact (2018, background): “Research on functional traits differentiates between “response traits,” which allow an organism to thrive (i.e., become abundant) in a novel environment, and “effect traits,” which cause changes (i.e., per capita effects) to that environment (Suding et al. 2008).”
Towards a framework for understanding the context dependence of impacts of non‐native tree species (2020, background): “2.2 | Context dependence in per capita effects (E) Per capita effect, or the effect size per individual, is mediated by the effect traits of the species in question (Hulme et al., 2013; Ricciardi et al., 2013; Suding et al., 2008) and intraspecific variation in those traits.”
Coral reef ecosystem services in the Anthropocene (2019, background): “Where there is overlap between traits that contribute to specific functions and traits that respond to disturbances, it is possible to map out relationships between drivers of change and ecosystem functions (Suding et al., 2008).”
REVIEW: Predictive ecology in a changing world (2015, background): “the focus on these facets of biodiversity poses several problems for prediction, as the knowledge of, say, species responses to environmental change is not sufficient to predict the assembly of novel communities (Suding et al. 2008).”
Understanding biodiversity-ecosystem service relationships in urban areas: A comprehensive literature review (2017, neutral): “Thus far, this framework has only been applied successfully in semi-natural ecosystems (Moretti et al. 2013; Suding et al. 2008).”
A trait-based approach to comparative functional plant ecology: concepts, methods and applications for agroecology. A review (2012, background): “From this pool, the habitat filter, which involves both abiotic and biotic components, is assumed to sort species according to their attributes (based on Woodward and Diament 1991; Keddy 1992a; Grime 2006; Suding et al. 2008; Cornwell and Ackerly 2009).”