Beyond trait distances: Functional distinctiveness captures the outcome of plant competition

Functional trait distances between coexisting organisms reflect not only complementarity in the way they use resources, but also differences in their competitive abilities. Accordingly, absolute and relative trait distances have been widely used to capture the effects of niche dissimilarity and competitive hierarchies, respectively, on the performance of plants in competition. However, multiple dimensions of the plant phenotype are involved in these plant-plant interactions (PPI), challenging the use of relative trait distances to predict their outcomes. Furthermore, estimating the effects of competitive hierarchy on the performance of a group of coexisting plants remains particularly difficult since relative trait distances relate to the effects of a focal plant on another. We argue that trait distinctiveness, an emerging facet of functional diversity that characterizes the eccentric position of a species (or genotype) in a phenotypic space, can reveal the unique role played by a given..., We provided the raw data and the R script used to process and analyze the data. The raw data come from an experiment conducted by the co-authors as indicated in the paper's materials and methods., R is needed to process and analyze the data. All the necessary library are listed in the script.