Let the concept of indicator species be functional!

摘要

AimsThe identification of diagnostic or indicator species with high fidelity to a given group of sites is an important step for the ecological characterization of habitats or community types. The determination of the degree of fidelity to a target group is traditionally performed by analysing the concentration of species occurrences or abundances in different groups of sites. Surprisingly, although one of the main purposes of indicator species analysis is to give ecological meaning to groups of sites, none of the methods proposed to date take into account the functional ecology of diagnostic species. Therefore, the question we address here is: can we use functional traits of species to improve the diagnostic value of indicator species?