Functional Diversity

This chapter provides some metrics for measuring functional diversity, another important diversity component in ecological studies. The metrics for functional diversity covered only some common used ones in this book, like functional richness, functional evenness, Rao’s quadratic entropy index, functional divergence, functional regularity and functional attribute diversity. The computation for functional diversity of traits presented in categorical variables is also discussed.

Keywords: Categorical variable versus continuous variable, ecological indicators, ecosystem functioning, extinction risk, functional diversity, functional redundancy, functional richness and evenness, functional traits, molecular information, phenotype, statistical ecology.