La diversidad funcional en la ecología de comunidades

Abstract

Córdova-Tapia, F., Zambrano, L. 2015. Functional diversity in community ecology. Ecosistemas 24(3): 78-87. Doi.: 10.7818/ECOS.2015.24-3.10 With the aim of providing an overview of the concept of functional diversity and its application in the study of community ecology, this study examines the concepts of functional trait, functional niche and functional redundancy, and analyzes the classification of species into functional groups, the relationship between taxonomic diversity and functional diversity, and the usefulness of functional diversity to test assembly rules. Increasingly, empirical evidence on the study of the functional diversity there has the potential to clarify many of the patterns that have been observed in the communities and link them with the processes involved. However, one major challenge is to identify the functional traits that best describe the function of organisms in ecosystems are. Functional diversity has four separate components: functional richness, functional evenness, functional divergence and functional specialization. The relationship between functional richness and species richness is the key to understanding the effect of the number of species on ecosystem processes. Notwithstanding this importance, the relationship is still not clear in natural systems. In this sense, fish communities are an excellent model for analyzing communities in natural systems that incorporate multiple trophic levels. One of the most important applications of functional diversity in ecological communities is theory test assembly rules at different spatial and temporal scales.