A protocol for reproducible functional diversity analyses

Abstract

The widespread use of species traits in basic and applied ecology, conservation and biogeography has led to an exponential increase in functional diversity analyses, with > 10 000 papers published in 2010–2020, and > 1800 papers only in 2021. This interest is reflected in the development of a multitude of theoretical and methodological frameworks for calculating functional diversity, making it challenging to navigate the myriads of options and to report detailed accounts of trait-based analyses. Therefore, the discipline of trait-based ecology would benefit from the existence of a general guideline for standard reporting and good practices for analyses. We devise an eight-step protocol to guide researchers in conducting and reporting functional diversity analyses, with the overarching goal of increasing reproducibility, transparency and comparability across studies. The protocol is based on: 1) identification of a research question; 2) a sampling scheme and a study design; 3–4) assemblage of data matrices; 5) data exploration and preprocessing; 6) functional diversity computation; 7) model fitting, evaluation and interpretation; and 8) data, metadata and code provision. Throughout the protocol, we provide information on how to best select research questions, study designs, trait data, compute functional diversity, interpret results and discuss ways to ensure reproducibility in reporting results. To facilitate the implementation of this template, we further develop an interactive web-based application (stepFD) in the form of a checklist workflow, detailing all the steps of the protocol and allowing the user to produce a final ‘reproducibility report' to upload alongside the published paper. A thorough and transparent reporting of functional diversity analyses ensures that ecologists can incorporate others' findings into meta-analyses, the shared data can be integrated into larger databases for consensus analyses, and available code can be reused by other researchers. All these elements are key to pushing forward this vibrant and fast-growing field of research.