Data from: The ternary diagram of functional diversity

Among the many diversity indices in the ecologist toolbox, measures that
can be partitioned into additive terms are particularly useful as the
different components can be related to different ecological processes
shaping community structure. In this paper, an additive diversity
decomposition is proposed to partition the diversity structure of a given
community into three complementary fractions: functional diversity,
functional redundancy, and species dominance. These three components sum
up to one. Therefore, they can be used to portray the community structure
in a ternary diagram. Since the identification of community-level patterns
is an essential step to investigate the main drivers of species
co-existence, the ternary diagram of functional diversity can be used to
relate different facets of diversity to community assembly processes more
exhaustively than looking only at one index at a time. The value of the
proposed diversity decomposition is demonstrated by the analysis of actual
abundance data on plant assemblages sampled in grazed and ungrazed
grasslands in Tuscany (Central Italy).