funspace: an R package to build, analyze and plot functional trait spaces

Functional trait space analyses are pivotal to describe and compare organisms’ functional diversity across the tree of life. Yet, there is no single application that streamlines the many sometimes-troublesome steps needed to build and analyze functional trait spaces.

To fill this gap, we propose funspace, an R package to easily handle bivariate and multivariate (PCA-based) functional trait space analyses. The six functions that constitute the package can be grouped in three modules: ‘Building and exploring’, ‘Mapping’, and ‘Plotting’. The building and exploring module defines the main features of a functional trait space (e.g., functional diversity metrics) by leveraging kernel density-based methods. The mapping module uses general additive models to map how a target variable distributes within a trait space. The plotting module provides many options for creating flexible and high-quality figures representing the outputs obtained from previous modules. We provide a worked example to demonstrate a complete funspace workflow.

funspace will provide researchers working with functional traits across the tree of life with an indispensable asset to easily explore: (i) the main features of any functional trait space, (ii) the relationship between a functional trait space and any other biological or non-biological factor that might contribute to shaping species’ functional diversity.