Are the functional diversity terms functional? The hindrances of functional diversity understanding in the Brazilian scientific community

Abstract

Interest in functional diversity has grown in recent years, indicating that knowledge on ecosystem functions gain importance. However, the incongruent use of terms may lead to misunderstandings and incomparable results. We aimed to review terms used in functional diversity among the Brazilian scientific community to identify if there is a lack of consensus in the terminology used. We applied online surveys to assess how these terms have been used by the Brazilian academics and searched for their definitions in the scientific literature. The definition of "ecological function" by Brazilian academics is like that of the niche, but we only found two articles defining such a term in the literature. Thus, it seems that "ecosystem function" is a more commonly used term outside of Brazil. The definition of "guilds" coincided with that used in the literature, although we still observed a lack of consensus in the latter. For "traits," "functional group," and "functional diversity" concepts, we found some discrepancy between the literature and questionnaires. These inconsistencies can be related to the use of different organizational levels for the definition of traits and to the practice of replacing species with functional groups in standard taxonomic diversity metrics, considering them as measurements of functional diversity. The adoption of cohesive terminology is crucial to ensure the comparability of scientific results in the scientific literature. However, finding a consensus in ecology represents a hard task; therefore, we encourage that, at least, researchers make clear which key concepts they adopted in their research to avoid misunderstandings.

A global synthesis and meta‐analysis of the environmental heterogeneity effects on the freshwater biodiversity

“…Interestingly, those inconsistencies are common in ecological studies. For example, there are several efforts to gather and synthetize ecological concepts of terms around functional ecology, beta diversity, ecological invasions and metacommunity (Leibold et al 2004, Falk‐Petersen et al 2006, Tuomisto 2010, Bastos‐Pereira et al 2022). In our review, we systematically collect and present a set of terms associated with the most used methodological approaches and link these methods to spatial EH proxies and taxonomic groups, providing a more comprehensive framework for future research on the topic (Table 1).…”