Assessing the effects of environmental constraints on community structure often relies on methods that consider changes in species functional traits in response to environmental processes. Various indices have been proposed to measure relevant aspects of community trait composition from different viewpoints and perspectives. Among these, the 'community-weighted mean trait value' (CWM) and the Rao coefficient have been widely used in ecological research for summarizing different facets of functional composition and diversity. Analyzing changes in functional diversity of bee communities along a post-fire successional gradient in southern Switzerland we show that these two measures may be used to describe two complementary aspects of community structure, such as the mean and the dispersion of functional traits within a given species assemblage. While CWM can be adequately used to summarize shifts in mean trait values within communities due to environmental selection for certain functional traits, the Rao coefficient can be effectively applied to analyze patterns of trait convergence or divergence compared to a random expectation.

Accurate mapping of species distributions is a fundamental goal of modern biogeography, both for basic and applied purposes. This is commonly done by plotting known species occurrences, expert-drawn range maps or geographical estimations derived from species distribution models. However, all three kinds of maps are implicitly subject to uncertainty, due to the quality and bias of raw distributional data, the process of map building, and the dynamic nature of species distributions themselves. Here we review the main sources of uncertainty suggesting a code of good practices in order to minimize their effects. Specifically, we claim that uncertainty should be always explicitly taken into account and we propose the creation of maps of ignorance to provide information on where the mapped distributions are reliable and where they are uncertain

1. The preservation of ecosystem processes under ongoing biotic erosion requires that some species within affected communities perform similar functions, a property that is usually defined as functional redundancy. Although functional redundancy has recently become a relevant part of ecological research, so far there is no agreement on itsmeasurement.\ud 2. The scope of this work is thus to propose a consistent framework based on functional dissimilarities among species for summarizing different facets of functional redundancy. The behaviour of the proposed measures is illustrated with one small artificial data set, together with actual examples on the species functional turnover along successional gradients.\ud 3. We believe this new framework provides an important contribution for the clarification and quantification of key metrics of community redundancy and vulnerability. The method, for which we provide a simple R function called ‘uniqueness’, further allows summarizing the functional contribution of single species to the overall redundancy of any type of biological community

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Aim Differentiation of sites or communities is often measured by partitioning regional or gamma diversity into additive or multiplicative alpha and beta components. The beta component and the ratio of within-group to total diversity (alpha/gamma) are then used to infer the compositional differentiation or similarity of the sites. There is debate about the appropriate measures and partitioning formulas for this purpose. We test the main partitioning methods, using empirical and simulated data, to see if some of these methods lead to false conclusions, and we show how to resolve the problems that we uncover. Location South America, Ecuador, Orellana province, Rio Shiripuno. Methods We construct sets of real and simulated tropical butterfly communities that can be unambiguously ranked according to their degree of differentiation. We then test whether beta and similarity measures from the different partitioning approaches rank these datasets correctly. Results The ratio of within-group diversity to total diversity does not reflect compositional similarity, when the Gini-Simpson index or Shannon entropy are used to measure diversity. Additive beta diversity based on the Gini-Simpson index does not reflect the degree of differentiation between N sites or communities. Main conclusions The ratio of within-group to total diversity (alpha/gamma) should not be used to measure the compositional similarity of groups, if diversity is equated with Shannon entropy or the Gini-Simpson index. Conversion of these measures to effective number of species solves these problems. Additive Gini-Simpson beta diversity does not directly reflect the differentiation of N samples or communities. However, when properly transformed onto the unit interval so as to remove the dependence on alpha and N, additive and multiplicative beta measures yield identical normalized measures of relative similarity and differentiation

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