What is functional diversity in an ecosystem?
What is functional diversity in an ecosystem?
Functional diversity is a component of biodiversity that generally concerns the range of things that organisms do in communities and ecosystems. Choosing which traits to include in a particular measure of functional diversity will depend on the specific aims of a particular study.
How does the diversity of species within a functional type affect ecosystem processes?
If those resources limit growth, then increasing functional richness should lead to greater total productivity and decreased loss of resources from the ecosystem. Facilitative interactions among species could also lead to increases in ecosystem pools or process rates as species or functional richness increase.
What is Faith’s phylogenetic diversity?
Faith’s phylogenetic diversity (PD), which is defined as the sum of the branch lengths of a phylogenetic tree connecting all species, takes into account phylogenetic differences among species and has found many applications in various research fields.
What are the four types of Biodiversity?
Four Types of Biodiversity
- Species Diversity. Every ecosystem contains a unique collection of species, all interacting with each other.
- Genetic Diversity. Genetic diversity describes how closely related the members of one species are in a given ecosystem.
- Ecosystem Diversity.
- Functional Diversity.
What are the types of Biodiversity?
Types of Biodiversity. Biodiversity includes three main types: diversity within species (genetic diversity), between species (species diversity) and between ecosystems (ecosystem diversity).
What is phylogenetic biodiversity?
Phylogenetic diversity (“PD”) is a measure of biodiversity, based on phylogeny (the tree of life). Faith (1992) defined the phylogenetic diversity of a set of species as equal to the sum of the lengths of all those branches on the tree that span the members of the set.
What is phylogenetic endemism?
Phylogenetic endemism (PE), on the contrary, incorporates phylogenetic information with species range sizes to measure the extent to which an assemblage contains phylogenetically distinct and geographically restricted clades (Rosauer et al., 2009; Sandel et al., 2020).
Can phylogenetic diversity predict ecosystem function?
Two issues arise in the use of phylogenetic diversity to predict ecosystem functioning, one important to community ecology in general and one specific to grassland biodiversity–ecosystem-function research.
Do phylogenetic diversity and functional trait variation control biomass production?
To address how phylogenetic diversity and functional trait variation control biodiversity effects on biomass production, we summarized the results of 29 grassland plant experiments where both the phylogeny of plant species used in the experiments is well described and where extensive trait data are available.
Does functional trait variation correlate with phylogenetic distances between species?
Functional trait variation was only partially related to phylogenetic distances between species, and the resulting FD values therefore correlate only partially with PD.
Can PD and FD predict the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem function?
Both PD and FD can be valuable predictors of the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning, which suggests that a focus on both community trait diversity and evolutionary history can improve understanding of the consequences of biodiversity loss.
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