Is the use of unconstrained ordination appropriate for understanding plant ecological strategies and ecosystem functioning?

, ,
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.2631v2
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
Zhu L, Lefcheck JS, Fu B. 2017. Is the use of unconstrained ordination appropriate for understanding plant ecological strategies and ecosystem functioning? PeerJ Preprints 5:e2631v2

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

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