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Mammals On Mountainsides Revisited: Analyzing Multiple Dimensions Of Diversity To Gain New Insight On Community Assembly And Biogeography, Brooks Kohli

Doctoral Dissertations

Understanding how biodiversity is distributed, maintained, and altered is a fundamental goal of ecology and is especially important for predicting the effects of ongoing rapid environmental change. Traditionally, diversity has been described in taxonomic terms using the number and abundance of species (e.g., species richness). However, biodiversity is multi-faceted and includes functional (ecological traits) and phylogenetic (evolutionary relationships) dimensions that emphasize the similarities and differences among species. Functional diversity is particularly appealing because it quantifies the range and prevalence of traits in an assemblage and helps link patterns of diversity to the ecological processes that generate them. I used a …