Quantifying the relevance of intraspecific trait variability for functional diversity

0364936 - BÚ 2012 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
de Bello, Francesco - Lavorel, S. - Albert, C. H. - Thuiller, W. - Grigulis, K. - Doležal, Jiří - Janeček, Štěpán - Lepš, Jan
Quantifying the relevance of intraspecific trait variability for functional diversity.
Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Roč. 2, č. 2 (2011), 163-174. ISSN 2041-210X. E-ISSN 2041-2096
R&D Projects: GA AV ČR IAA600050802; GA ČR GA206/09/1471; GA AV ČR KJB601110703
Institutional research plan: CEZ:AV0Z60050516; CEZ:AV0Z50070508
Keywords : Land-use change * ecosystem processes * quadratic entropy
Subject RIV: EF - Botanics
Impact factor: 5.093, year: 2011

Intraspecific trait variability is a crucial, often neglected, component of functional diversity (FD) in ecological communities. In particular, uncertainty remains as to the importance of intraspecific variability in the quantification of FD. To explore this uncertainty, we propose two methods addressing two critical and complementary, but largely unexplored, questions: (i) what is the extent of within- vs. between-species FD in different communities? and (ii) to what extent is the response of FD to environment because of compositional turnover vs. intraspecific trait variability across habitats? The methods proposed to address these questions are built on a variance partitioning approach and have the advantage of including species relative abundance, therefore taking into account species dominance and rarity. For each of the questions, we illustrate one dedicated case study in semi-natural grasslands with associated sampling strategies. The decomposition of total community variance into within- vs. between-species effects can be implemented in a manner similar to the decomposition of quadratic entropy on pairwise individual dissimilarity. The approach can be applied with single and multiple traits.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0200295