Pitfalls of ignoring trait resolution when drawing conclusions about ecological processes

Aim: Understanding how ecological communities are assembled remains a grand challenge in ecology with direct implications for charting the future of biodiversity. Trait-based methods have emerged as the leading approach for quantifying functional community structure (convergence, divergence) but their potential for inferring assembly processes rests on accurately measuring functional dissimilarity among community members. Here, we argue that trait resolution (from finest-resolution continuous measurements to coarsest-resolution binary categories) remains a critically overlooked methodological variable, even though categorical classification is known to mask functional variability and inflate functional redundancy among species or individuals.

Innovation: We present the first detailed predictions of trait resolution biases and demonstrate, with simulations, how the distortion of signal strength by increasingly coarse-resolution traits can fundamentally alter functional structure patte...