ABSTRACT

For more than 200 years ecologists have appreciated that an organism’s phenotypic traits dictate its interactions with the physical environment and other organisms. This chapter provides an overview of major statistical methods for trait-based ecological modeling. A ‘functional trait’ is a trait that indirectly effects an organism’s fitness. The degree to which a functional trait is related to fitness can vary, from a trait such as leaf photosynthetic rate, which is strongly related to resource acquisition, to a trait such as specific leaf area, which is positively associated with some measures of photosynthetic rate. Morphological measurements of trait values taken on individual organisms are the most basic kind of data for trait-based analyses. However, replicate sample data sufficient to estimate statistical distributions are difficult to come by, because they require intensive field sampling that is beyond the scope of most research projects.