In light of rapid shifts in biodiversity associated with human impacts, there is an urgent need
to understand how changing patterns in biodiversity impact ecosystem function. Functional …

Approximately 25 years ago, ecologists became increasingly interested in the question of
whether ongoing biodiversity loss matters for the functioning of ecosystems. As such, a new …

Functional diversity (FD), the diversity of organism attributes that relates to their interactions
with the abiotic and biotic environment, has been increasingly used for the last two decades …

Animals have diversified into a bewildering variety of morphological forms exploiting a
complex configuration of trophic niches. Their morphological diversity is widely used as an …

Land use and related pressures have reduced local terrestrial biodiversity, but it is unclear
how the magnitude of change relates to the recently proposed planetary boundary (“safe …

Biodiversity enhances many of nature's benefits to people, including the regulation of
climate and the production of wood in forests, livestock forage in grasslands and fish in …

Contents Summary 50 I. Introduction 50 II. Drivers of the diversity–productivity relationship
51 III. Patterns of the diversity–productivity relationship 55 IV. Responses of mixed stands to …

Traits are measurable features of organisms. Functional traits aspire to more. They quantify
an organism's ecology and, ultimately, predict ecosystem functions based on local …

One of ecology's grand challenges is develo** general rules to explain and predict highly
complex systems. Understanding and predicting ecological processes from species' traits …

Recent studies have shown that accounting for intraspecific trait variation (ITV) may better
address major questions in community ecology. However, a general picture of the relative …