Functional ecology is a branch of ecology that focuses on the roles, or functions, that species play in the community or ecosystem in which they occur. In this approach, physiological, anatomical, and life history characteristics of the species are emphasized. The term "function" is used to emphasize certain physiological processes rather than discrete properties, describe an organism's role in a trophic system, or illustrate the effects of natural selective processes on an organism. This sub-discipline of ecology represents the crossroads between ecological patterns and the processes and mechanisms that underlie them. Researchers use two different tools in functional ecology: screening, which involves measuring a trait across a number of species, and empiricism, which provides quantitative relationships for the traits measured in screening. Functional ecology often emphasizes an integrative approach, using organism traits and activities to understand community dynamics and ecosystem processes, particularly in response to the rapid global changes occurring in Earth's environment. Functional ecology sits at the nexus of several disparate disciplines and serves as the unifying principle between evolutionary ecology, evolutionary biology, genetics and genomics, and traditional ecological studies. It explores such areas as "[species'] competitive abilities, patterns of species co-occurrence, community assembly, and the role of different traits on ecosystem functioning".
History The notion that ecosystems' functions can be affected by their constituent parts has its origins in the 19th century. Charles Darwin's On The Origin of Species is one of the first texts to directly comment on the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem health by noting a positive correlation between plant density and ecosystem productivity. In his influential 1927 work, Animal Ecology, Charles Elton proposed classifying an ecosystem based on the how its members utilize resources. By the 1950s, Elton's model of ecosystems was widely accepted, where organisms that shared similarities in resource use occupied the same 'guild' within an ecosystem. Beginning in the 1970s, an increased interest in functional classification revolutionized functional ecology. 'Guilds' would be re-termed 'functional groups', and classification schemes began to focus more on interactions between species and trophic levels. Functional ecology became widely understood to be the study of ecological processes that concern the adaptations of organism within the ecosystem. In the 1990s, biodiversity became better understood as the diversity of species' ecological functions within an ecosystem, rather than simply a great number of different species present. Finally, in the 2000s researchers began using functional classification schemes to examine ecosystems' and organisms' responses to drastic change and disturbance, and the impact of function loss on the health of an ecosystem.
Functional Diversity Functional diversity is widely considered to be "the value and the range of those species and organismal traits that influence ecosystem functioning" In this sense, the use of the term "function" may apply to individuals, populations, communities, trophic levels, or evolutionary process (i.e. considering the function of adaptations). Functional diversity was conceived as an alternative classification to schemes using genetic diversity or physiological diversity to measure the ecological importance of species in an environment, as well as a way to understand how biodiversity affects specific ecosystem functions, where in this context, 'biodiversity' refers to the diversity of ecosystem functions present in a given system. Understanding ecosystems via functional diversity is as powerful as it is broadly applicable and gives insight into observable patterns in ecosystems, such as species occurrence, species competitive abilities, and the influence of biological communities on ecosystem functioning.
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