Is the use of unconstrained ordination appropriate for understanding plant ecological strategies and ecosystem functioning?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Ecology, Plant Science
- Keywords
- Trait dimensionality, Principal components analysis, Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, Economics spectrum, Principal coordinates analysis, Functional diversity, Context dependency, Structural equation modeling, Functional trait diversity, Network approach, Fourth-corner analysis, Whole-plant perspective
- Copyright
- © 2017 Zhu et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Is the use of unconstrained ordination appropriate for understanding plant ecological strategies and ecosystem functioning? PeerJ Preprints 5:e2631v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2631v2
Abstract
The use of functional traits has increased exponentially in ecology, particularly in attempting to understand plant strategies and ecosystem functioning. This popularity has led to many proposed definitions of functional traits, which in turn has informed recommendations about how to gather, summarize, and analyze trait data. In this paper, we revisit the definition of the functional trait from the perspective of physiological, community and ecosystem ecology, and reason towards a broad, unrestrictive, and applicable definition. We then outline the conceptual mismatch between this definition and the popular practice of summarizing trait information using unconstrained ordination . We make specific suggestions about alternative methods to gain a mechanistic insight into how traits translate into functions. We hope this paper will improve our ability to move towards an ecological synthesis using a trait-based approach.
Author Comment
Revised manuscript submitted to PeerJ concurrently with submission to a peer-reviewed journal