Conclusion
Partitioning the variance among multiple ecological scales allows to get
a less fragmented picture of all possible underlying variables that can
drive community assembly and avoid misinterpretations of traits
variations in field studies. Moreover, while many studies focused on
mean trait values, we aim to consider the strong role of ITV in species
coexistence and their responses to filters. To go further, we plead to
consider other trait metrics in future studies to better describe trait
distributions and assess the processes underlying plant community
assembly. As for example, skewness and kurtosis (Enquist et al., 2015;
Gross et al., 2017) are a complement to the mean and the variance and
reflect respectively trait distribution asymmetry and the evenness of
functional diversity. As such, they could be indicative of competition
(Gross et al., 2009; Schamp et al., 2007) or rapid environmental change
(Enquist et al., 2015; Le Bagousse-Pinguet et al., 2017). Consequently,
these metrics would be very useful to predict for responses to changing
environment or their effects on ecosystem functioning (Gross et al.,
2017).