Functional diversity measures: an overview of their redundancy and their ability to discriminate community assembly rules

Summary 1. Indices quantifying the functional aspect of biodiversity are essential in understanding relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and environmental constraints. Many indices of functional diversity have been published but we lack consensus about what indices quantify, how redundant they are and which ones are recommended. 2. This study aims to build a typology of functional diversity indices from artificial data sets encompassing various community structures (different assembly rules, various species richness levels) and to identify a set of independent indices able to discriminate community assembly rules. 3. Our results confirm that indices can be divided into three main…