Functional Diversity: An Epistemic Roadmap
2019
Malaterre, Christophe | Dussault, Antoine, C. | Mermans, Ely | Barker, Gillian | Beisner, Beatrix | Bouchard, Frédéric | Desjardins, Eric | Handa, I Tanya | Kembel, Steven | Lajoie, Geneviève | Maris, Virginie | Munson, Alison | Odenbaugh, Jay | Poisot, Timothée | Shapiro, B Jesse | Suttle, Curtis | Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (CIRST) ; Université de Montréal (UdeM)-Université du Québec à Montréal = University of Québec in Montréal (UQAM) | Université du Québec à Montréal = University of Québec in Montréal (UQAM) | Collège Lionel-Groulx | Université de Montréal (UdeM) | Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST) ; Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (UP1)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) | University of Western Ontario (UWO) | Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en limnologie et en environnement aquatique - GRIL (Montréal, Canada) ; Université de Montréal (UdeM) | Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (CEFE) ; Université Paul-Valéry - Montpellier 3 (UPVM)-Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA)-Centre international d'études supérieures en sciences agronomiques (Montpellier SupAgro)-École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) ; Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université de Montpellier (UM)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD [Occitanie])-Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier (Montpellier SupAgro) | Université Laval [Québec] (ULaval) | Lewis & Clark College [Portland] | Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries ; University of British Columbia [Canada] (UBC)
International audience
Show more [+] Less [-]English. Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do (i.e., their functional traits) within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological (i.e., epistemic) assumptions that cut across various theories and domains of ecology. These assumptions should be clearly addressed, notably for the sake of an effective comparison and integration across domains, and for assessing whether or not to use functional diversity approaches for developing ecological management strategies. The objective of this contribution is to identify and critically analyze the most salient of these assumptions. To this aim, we provide an epistemic roadmap that pinpoints these assumptions along a set of historical, conceptual, empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions.
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