Quantifying species distribution within the functional space

Multidimensional representations of functional diversity help visualize species and organism distribution in functional space, providing insights into the mechanisms regulating community assembly and ecosystem functioning. Typically, the species distributions in functional space are represented by richness, divergence (or dispersion) and evenness (or regularity). While these dimensions quantify the overall structure of species distribution, they overlook how exactly species are scattered within the functional space, particularly the fine-scale spatial patterns that may reveal additional ecological or evolutionary dynamics.
We introduce a novel framework to quantify species’ functional arrangement within the functional space, capturing patterns across broad and fine scales. We detail the construction of a functional space and propose statistics to assess species functional arrangement - the cumulative proportion of pairwise neighbours (PNcp) and the cumulative proportion of nearest neigh..., , ### Description of Files

* **SimStudy_MEE_FINAL.R** – R script for the simulation study described in the manuscript.
* **SurtseyPlantsAnalysis_MEE_FINAL.R** – R script for the analysis of the Surtsey plant data.
* **SI_diff_sigma_FINAL.R** – R script for the sensitivity analysis of different sigma (kernel bandwidth) values.

### Data Availability

No new data were generated for this study.

* **Inventory data** were obtained from *Magnússon et al.* (2022).
* **Trait data** were obtained from *Díaz et al.* (2022), including the following traits:
* Plant height (PH)
* Diaspore mass (DM)
* Specific stem density (SSD)
* Leaf dry mass per unit leaf area (LMA)
* Leaf nitrogen content on a mass basis (LNM)
* Leaf area (LA)

### Data Sources

Díaz, S., Kattge, J., Cornelissen, J. H. C., Wright, I. J., Lavorel, S., Dray, S., Reu, B., Kleyer, M., Wirth, C., Prentice, I. C., Garnier, E., Bönisch, G., Westoby, M., Poorter, H., Reich, P. B., Moles, A. T., Dickie, J., Zanne, A.E., Chave,..., , ,