The Scale-Dependent Role of Biological Traits in Landscape Ecology: A Review

Abstract

We describe current approaches that evaluate how the influence of species traits on the relationship between environmental variables and ecological responses varies among scales (i.e. the scale-dependent role of traits). We quantify which traits and ecological responses have been assessed, and discuss the main challenges associated with quantifying the scale-dependent effect of traits. We identify three main approaches used to evaluate the scale-dependent role of traits, based on whether 1) traits are used as predictors or responses, 2) intraspecific variation in single traits is considered, or 3) trait diversity indices are used. Our review identifies several gaps that include the following: 1) evidence of the scale-dependent role of traits is biased towards studies of plants; 2) we lack evidence of whether the traits of interacting species groups are consistently related across spatial scales; and 3) interactions between species traits and landscape structure are usually ignored. The explicit inclusion of landscape structure effects in trait-based approaches at multiple scales will benefit the integration of approaches from community ecology and landscape ecology. This is important for describing the mechanisms that operate simultaneously across scales and for predicting the impact of landscape change on a broad range of ecological responses, including species diversity and interspecific interactions.