Communities can be defined as assemblages of species coexisting under particularenvironments. The relationship between environment and species are regulated byboth environmental requirements –which ultimately determine the species capacity toestablish and survive in a particular environment– and the ecological interactionsoccurring during assembly processes –which also determine community compositionby conditioning species coexistence. In this context, plant functional traits areattributes that represent ecological strategies and determine how plants respond toenvironmental factors and interact with other species. Therefore, the analysis of howtraits vary through the dynamics of communities, such as along successions, can giveinsights about how environmental requirements and species interactions maydetermine the composition and functional structure of these communities. Thexerophytic shrub communities inhabiting inland sand dunes in SW Portugal arecharacterized by successional processes that are mainly driven by local (edaphicgradients and human disturbance) and regional (climate) processes. Therefore, theyconstitute an appropriate system for studying species interactions and environmentcommunityco-variations based on functional terms. Using these communities as amodel, we evaluate the hypothesis that successional community changes in speciescomposition of xerophytic shrub communities can result in concurrent changes infunctional diversity
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