Development and experimental validation of objective procedures to determine functional groups: A tool for biodiversity and global change research

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This project aims to develop novel, objective methods to define and find optimum functional groups (FG) for plants and invertebrates based on numerically derived traits that will be generated from long-term and experimental, well studied and published field data of grassland communities. These FGs will not simply represent a lumping together of bulk abundances of functionally similar species but instead form abundance matrices representing all member species of a FG and so retaining detailed information each single species may contribute to the properties of a FG. The derived FGs will be validated experimentally for their actual impact on relevant ecological functions.FGs are aggregated units of species sharing important ecological traits, and therefore perform the same ecosystem processes. As such, they are functionally meaningful surrogates that reduce biotic complexity to a manageable size, allowing to derive general principles or mechanisms behind community dynamics and their structure. Due to their independence of species, FGs can ideally be used for system comparisons across long time periods and along large geographic distances, which is a necessary condition to study, on community level, global change effects on biodiversity along climate gradients. A weak or inappropriate FG classification, however, will also lead to weak or meaningless results. Our project will result in a set of standardized procedures that allow others to analyze, in a consistent way, large amounts of community data typical for biodiversity and global change research.