Asking the pikas politely…
Differences between individuals are often not accounted for in studies using plant functional trait data. Variation due to biotic and abiotic conditions is common for many plant traits that are crucial for fitness and survival. However, functional trait methods usually do not account for differences that could be present between sites and between individuals. In order to see how much intraspecific variation impacts our understanding of community functioning I collected a full sample of functional traits (height, biomass and LMA) for all individuals within a community. I compared this true community LMA distribution to the abundance weighted species mean LMA distribution. The statistical moments from these two distributions did not match up, indicating that intraspecific trait variation was present in the sampled communities. While the differences between the methods was not statistically significant, including more sites would likely elucidate differences more clearly. Our understanding of functional traits has been limited without taking into account intraspecific trait variation. Further insight into how functional traits vary between and within species can help in the process of scaling from organisms to community and ecosystem processes.
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