Characterizing Land Use Impacts on Functional Plant Diversity for Life Cycle Assessments.

ABSTRACT: Decision support tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA) increasingly aim to account for impacts on biodiversity. While taxonomic measures like species richness have been implemented, they do not fully grasp the impacts on ecosystem functioning. Functional diversity, derived from the species' traits, is more representative of ecosystem processes. This study provides a framework for developing characterization factors for functional diversity as affected by land use. It exploits the large databases on plant traits and species composition that have recently become available and allow bringing biodiversity impact assessment to the next level. Three functional diversity indices therein describe different aspects of functional diversity, namely richness, evenness, and divergence. Applying our

SUBMITTER: Scherer L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7271546 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature