In this blog post, Lucie Kuczynski – a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oldenburg, Germany – presents her research “Functional diversity loss and taxonomic delays of European freshwater fish and North American breeding birds“. She talks about identifying delays in changes of functional diversity, the usefulness of open data, and the importance of seeking support.
About the Paper
The pace of change in diversity is accelerating. In a previous study, we demonstrated that these rates of change may be underestimated. In addition to the aforementioned misestimation, the pace of diversity change may be slowed by ecological processes such as phenotypic plasticity and phenological changes. What are the implications of this for functional diversity (i.e. the component of diversity accounted for by species-specific traits)? Is there a straightforward way to identify delays in changes in functional diversity? This study aimed to answer the question of how to identify delays in changes in functional diversity. It proposed a simple framework based on the previous study, which only focused on taxonomic diversity. Applying this framework to European fresh fish and North American breeding birds revealed that early colonisations outpaced functional gains. This indicates that although new species arrived earlier than the extinction of other species, the acquisition of new functional traits lagged. While this may provide a short-term stabilisation of communities, excessive redundancy can compromise biodiversity’s capacity to respond to environmental variations, thereby undermining long-term resilience. This work helps us to better understand the functional consequences of biodiversity changes and provides us with a tool to try to prevent potential permanent loss of diversity and unique sets of species traits.
The number of species found in a community may be uncorrelated to the number of unique features (i.e., functional traits) found in this community. Given the observed changes in the number of species (i.e., taxonomic diversity) and the lack of a corresponding increase in functional diversity (i.e., accounting for functional traits), it can be expected that the temporal dynamics of functional diversity will also show specific patterns, which may not be predictable from the trends in taxonomic diversity (Credit: the authors)
About the Research
We have used publicly available databases in our work. These data are the key to our project, and we would like to thank all the authors who have shared their data, which they have collected over a long period of time and at great expense. Having tested our framework on large datasets, we are now testing it on smaller, more local data to build on this local ecosystem management and conservation strategies.
About the Author
I have been engaged in ecological research for several years, although I am still an Early Career Researcher. While I enjoy painting, travelling and walking in nature, I find great satisfaction in analysing data and making sense of data where there seems to be no obvious patterns at first sight. I was fortunate to have the support of my labs throughout my career, which enabled me to gain the confidence to propose a new metric (and we know there are already a lot of them in community ecology)! If I could offer one piece of advice, it would be to ask for help and feedback whenever you need it/can, from anyone, regardless of their position. Everyone has something to contribute to research, and after all, it is a collective endeavour!
Lucie Kuczynski and the DynaCom Reseach Unit which had supported this project both financially but also by fostering open discussions and critical and genuine feedback (Credit: Lucie Kuczynski)
Like the blog post? Read the paper here
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