Can we leverage functional traits to predict or control the dynamics of species-rich communities? We just had a new paper come out exploring these ideas. You can read it at Oikos or download a PDF.

The paper first surveys the general problem of prediction and control in a community context.

It then shows how functional traits can be used to parameterize dynamical models of communities. This is a substantially different approach than prior ideas for associating traits with the outcomes of dynamical models (e.g. species richness). The proposed approach instead makes more direct mechanistic linkages between traits and demography, and also enables reduction of the high-dimensional parameter space of these models to more tractable levels.

It then uses these parameterizations to show how many complex problems, e.g. predicting species invasions, can be reframed in terms of finding species whose traits, in a certain environment, yield particular dynamics.

Notably this approach also allows us to identify species whose abundances can be perturbed to reach certain targets, e.g. a certain community weighted trait mean, or a certain species richness.

Please give it a read – these are some fun early-stage ideas for shifting how we do community ecology.