Data from: The assembly of ecological communities inferred from taxonomic and functional composition

Among-site variation in metacommunities (beta diversity) is typically
correlated with the distance separating the sites (spatial lag). This
distance decay in similarity pattern has been linked to both niche-based
and dispersal-based community assembly hypotheses. Here we show that beta
diversity patterns in community composition, when supplemented with
functional-trait information, can be used to diagnose assembly processes.
First, using simulated data, we show how the relationship between distance
decay patterns in taxonomic and functional measures of community
composition can be used to predict the influence of a given trait on
community assembly. We then use the patterns generated by the simulation
as a template to show that the sorting of benthic macroinvertebrate
metacommunities in headwater streams is likely influenced by different
sets of functional traits at regional and local scales. We suggest that
functional-trait databases and spatially referenced taxonomic surveys can
be used to predict the spatial scales at which different aspects of
interspecific functional variation are involved in niche-based community
assembly while accounting for the influence of dispersal-based community
assembly processes.