Functional Diversity: From Organisms to Ecosystems

The objective of this teaching unit is to demonstrate that biological diversity serves a functional purpose:

1) for various groups of organisms: plants, insects, aquatic organisms, vertebrates, and

2) at different organizational scales (from organisms to ecosystems). The course aims to explain how to approach this functional aspect of diversity for the more than 10 million organisms present on the planet’s surface, using examples from highly and minimally anthropized environments.

What functional diversity is at different organizational levels, and the conceptual frameworks that have been developed around this concept.

Why and How the Functional Approach to Diversity Has Revitalized the Study of Community Structure