Data from: What North America’s skeleton crew of megafauna tells us about community disassembly

Functional trait diversity is increasingly used to model future changes in community structure despite a poor understanding of community disassembly's effects on functional diversity. By tracking the functional diversity of the North American large mammal fauna through the End-Pleistocene megafaunal extinction and up to the present, I show that contrary to expectations, functionally unique species are no more likely to go extinct than functionally redundant species. This makes total functional richness loss no worse than expected given similar taxonomic richness declines. However, where current species sit in functional space relative to pre-anthropogenic baselines is not random and likely explains ecosystem functional changes better than total functional richness declines. Prehistoric extinctions have left many extant species functionally isolated and future extinctions will cause even more rapid drops in functional richness.

尽管学界对群落解体对功能多样性的影响仍缺乏深入认知，但功能性状多样性（Functional trait diversity）正愈发广泛地被用于模拟群落结构的未来变化。本研究通过追踪更新世末期巨型动物灭绝事件至今的北美大型哺乳动物区系功能多样性，发现与预期相悖的是，功能独特物种的灭绝概率并不高于功能冗余物种。这意味着，在分类学丰富度出现类似降幅的情况下，总功能丰富度的损失并未超出预期。然而，当前物种相对于人类活动前基准状态在功能空间中的分布并非随机，且相较于总功能丰富度降幅，该分布特征或许能更好地解释生态系统的功能变化。史前灭绝事件已使众多现存物种陷入功能孤立状态，而未来的物种灭绝将导致功能丰富度以更快的速度下降。