The concepts of ‘plant functional types’ and ‘functional diversity’ in lake phytoplankton – a new understanding of phytoplankton ecology?

摘要: Summary 1. This is a discussion of the applicability to phytoplankton concepts ‘plant functional types’ (PFTs) and ‘functional diversity’ (FD), which originated in terrestrial plant ecology. 2. Functional traits driving performance species reflect important processes such as growth, sedimentation, grazing losses nutrient acquisition. 3. paper presents an objective, mathematical way assigning PFTs measuring FD. Ecologists can use this new approach investigate general hypotheses [e.g. intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH), insurance synchronicity phenomena] as, for example, its original formulation IDH makes predictions based on FD rather than diversity.