Triin published a News & Views article in “Nature Ecology & Evolution together with Sandra Nogue. The short article relates to the recently published article by Adeleye et al (2023), where the authors use pollen data to reconstruct past functional plant diversity changes over the last 12 000 years in southeast Australia. In the News & Views, Triin and Sandra discuss the possible mechanisms behind the different functional diversity and richness changes through time. For example, an increase in both richness and functional diversity indicates that species added to the ecosystem expand the existing functional space. This kind of increase is likely to be related to increasing environmental heterogeneity or to more favourable environmental conditions. The article is available here.
Photo: Reitalu, T., Nogué, S. Functional vegetation change over millennia. Nat Ecol Evol (2023)
