Do current definitions and methods promote the general application of functional traits and functional diversity

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1 Chinese Academy of Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Beijing, China
2 Department of Biological Sciences, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, The College of William & Mary, Gloucester Point, VA, United States
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2631v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Biodiversity, Ecology, Plant Science
Keywords
Plant ecological strategies, Principal Coordinates Analysis, Economics spectrum, Functional diversity, Functional trait diversity, Trait dimensionality, Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, Principal Components Analysis, Ordination
Copyright
© 2016 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
Zhu L, Lefcheck JS, Fu B. 2016. Do current definitions and methods promote the general application of functional traits and functional diversity. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2631v1

Abstract

The use of functional traits has increased exponentially in ecology, particularly in attempting to explain 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 ecologists, and reason towards a broad, unrestrictive, and applicable definition. We then demonstrate how a popular technique, ordination, which is used to collapse multivariate trait data into orthogonal axes, undermines this definition and the primary benefit of functional traits. We outline the conceptual pitfalls associated with ordination, and make specific suggestions about alternative methods that progress functional traits as generalizable proxies for how organisms affect ecosystem processes. We hope these suggestions will improve our ability to move towards an ecological synthesis using a trait-based approach.

Author Comment

This is a preprint hosted concurrent with submission to a peer-reviewed journal.

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