In its simplest definition, a trait is a surrogate of organismal performance, and this meaning of the term has been used by evolutionists for a long time. Over the last three decades, developments in community and ecosystem ecology have forced the concept of trait beyond these original boundaries, and trait-based approaches are now widely used in studies ranging from the level of organisms to that of ecosystems. Despite some attempts to fix the terminology, especially in plant ecology, there is currently a high degree of confusion in the use, not only of the term ''trait'' itself, but also in the underlying concepts it refers to. We therefore give an unambiguous definition of plant trait, with a particular emphasis on functional trait. A hierarchical perspective is proposed, extending the ''performance paradigm'' to plant ecology. ''Functional traits'' are defined as morpho-physiophenological traits which impact fitness indirectly via their effects on growth, reproduction and survival, the three components of individual performance. We finally present an integrative framework explaining how changes in trait values due to environmental variations are translated into organismal performance, and how these changes may influence processes at higher organizational levels. We argue that this can be achieved by developing ''integration functions'' which can be grouped into functional response (community level) and effect (ecosystem level) algorithms.
In its simplest definition, a trait is a surrogate of organismal performance, and this meaning of the term has been used by evolutionists for a long time. Over the last three decades, developments in community and ecosystem ecology have forced the concept of trait beyond these original boundaries, and trait-based approaches are now widely used in studies ranging from the level of organisms to that of ecosystems. Despite some attempts to fix the terminology, especially in plant ecology, there is currently a high degree of confusion in the use, not only of the term ''trait'' itself, but also in the underlying concepts it refers to. We therefore give an unambiguous definition of plant trait, with a particular emphasis on functional trait. A hierarchical perspective is proposed, extending the ''performance paradigm'' to plant ecology. ''Functional traits'' are defined as morpho-physiophenological traits which impact fitness indirectly via their effects on growth, reproduction and survival, the three components of individual performance. We finally present an integrative framework explaining how changes in trait values due to environmental variations are translated into organismal performance, and how these changes may influence processes at higher organizational levels. We argue that this can be achieved by developing ''integration functions'' which can be grouped into functional response (community level) and effect (ecosystem level) algorithms.
We developed a quantitative method, analogous to those used in statistical mechanics, to predict how biodiversity will vary across environments, which plant species from a species pool will be found in which relative abundances in a given environment, and which plant traits determine community assembly. This provides a scaling from plant traits to ecological communities while bypassing the complications of population dynamics. Our method treats community development as a sorting process involving species that are ecologically equivalent except with respect to particular functional traits, which leads to a constrained random assembly of species; the relative abundance of each species adheres to a general exponential distribution as a function of its traits. Using data for eight functional traits of 30 herbaceous species and community-aggregated values of these traits in 12 sites along a 42-year chronosequence of secondary succession, we predicted 94% of the variance in the relative abundances.
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