A Pragmatic Approach to Functional Ecology

Keddy, P

As ecology matures and as the world's environmental problems continue to multiply, the need for general predictive models also grows. However, it is one thing to assert that such models are needed, and quite another to produce them. I would like to draw attention to two recent parallel developments in ecology. When combined, they may produce general models, with immediate potential for use in solving both theoretical and applied problems. They also illustrate what we might think of as the basic tools of functional ecology (and Functional Ecology). After introducing these recent developments, or research tools, I will illustrate some aspects of their application using research on wetlands. These examples were selected because we have been trying explicitly to combine these tools for the last 5 years, and they illustrate some of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. Although the examples emphasize my background in plant ecology, it should be obvious that identical approaches apply to animal ecology as well. In the early issues of Functional Ecology, the question arose as to what functional ecology is (Bradshaw 1987a; Calow 1987; Grime,1987). I suggest that functional ecology has three basic components: (1) constructing trait matrices through screening; (2) exploring empirical relationships among these traits; and (3) determining the relation- ships between traits and environments. Ideally, functional ecology deals with traits measured on large numbers of species, since measurement of traits on very few species has two problems. First, it does not provide sufficiently large sample sizes to test whether correlations among traits, or between traits and environments, are statistically significant. Second, it does not tell us whether the observed patterns are general patterns in nature, or simply peculiarities of the autecology of the few species examined. The two tools for this research strategy in functional ecology already exist. One tool is screening such as we find in Grime & Hunt (1975) and Grime et al. (1981). The other tool is empirical ecology such as we find in Peters (1980) and Rigler (1982). Let us consider these tools in turn.

A Pragmatic Approach to Functional Ecology

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