Beyond species: functional diversity and the maintenance of ecological processes and services
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
- Teacher spread
- 0.166 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
Summary 1. The goal of conservation and restoration activities is to maintain biological diversity and the ecosystem services that this diversity provides. These activities traditionally focus on the measures of species diversity that include only information on the presence and abundance of species. Yet how diversity influences ecosystem function depends on the traits and niches filled by species. 2. Biological diversity can be quantified in ways that account for functional and phenotypic differences. A number of such measures of functional diversity (FD) have been created, quantifying the distribution of traits in a community or the relative magnitude of species similarities and differences. We review FD measures and why they are intuitively useful for understanding ecological patterns and are important for management. 3. In order for FD to be meaningful and worth measuring, it must be correlated with ecosystem function, and it should provide information above and beyond what species richness or diversity can explain. We review these two propositions, examining whether the strength of the correlation between FD and species richness varies across differing environmental gradients and whether FD offers greater explanatory power of ecosystem function than species richness. 4. Previous research shows that the relationship between FD and richness is complex and context dependent. Different functional traits can show individual responses to different gradients, meaning that important changes in diversity can occur with minimal change in richness. Further, FD can explain variation in ecosystem function even when richness does not. 5. Synthesis and applications . FD measures those aspects of diversity that potentially affect community assembly and function. Given this explanatory power, FD should be incorporated into conservation and restoration decision‐making, especially for those efforts attempting to reconstruct or preserve healthy, functioning ecosystems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Journal of Applied Ecology
- Topic
- Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies
- Field
- Environmental Science
- Canadian institutions
- University of Toronto
- Funders
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaMcGill University
- Keywords
- Species richnessEcologyEcosystemDiversity (politics)Context (archaeology)Species diversityBiodiversityAbundance (ecology)Ecosystem diversityGamma diversityNicheEcological nicheBiologyBeta diversityEnvironmental resource managementHabitatEnvironmental scienceSociology
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes