Mapping functional traits: comparing abundance and presence-absence estimates at large spatial scales.

ABSTRACT: Efforts to quantify the composition of biological communities increasingly focus on functional traits. The composition of communities in terms of traits can be summarized in several ways. Ecologists are beginning to map the geographic distribution of trait-based metrics from various sources of data, but the maps have not been tested against independent data. Using data for birds of the Western Hemisphere, we test for the first time the most commonly used method for mapping community trait composition - overlaying range maps, which assumes that the local abundance of a given species is unrelated to the traits in question - and three new methods that as well as the range maps include varying degrees of information about interspecific and geographic variation in abundance. For each method, an

SUBMITTER: Newbold T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3432103 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature