Functional traits in lichen ecology: A review of challenge and opportunity

Abstract

Community ecology has experienced a major transition, from a focus on patterns in taxonomic composition, to revealing the processes underlying community assembly through the analysis of species functional traits. The power of the functional trait approach is its generality, predictive capacity such as with respect to environmental change, and, through linkage of response and effect traits, the synthesis of community assembly with ecosystem function and services. Lichens are a potentially rich source of information about how traits govern community structure and function, thereby creating opportunity to better integrate lichens into ‘mainstream’ ecological studies, while lichen ecology and conservation can also benefit from using the trait approach as an investigative tool. This paper brings together a range of author perspectives to review the use of traits in lichenology, particularly with respect to European ecosystems from the Mediterranean to the Arctic-Alpine. It emphasizes the types of traits that lichenologists have used in their studies, both response and effect, the bundling of traits towards the evolution of life-history strategies, and the critical importance of scale (both spatial and temporal) in functional trait ecology.