title: A family of functional dissimilarity measures for presence and absence data.
abstract: Plot-to-plot dissimilarity measures are considered a valuable tool for understanding the complex ecological mechanisms that drive community composition. Traditional presence/absence coefficients are usually based on different combinations of the matching/mismatching components of the 2 × 2 contingency table. However, more recently, dissimilarity measures that incorporate information about the degree of functional differences between the species in both plots have received increasing attention. This is because such "functional dissimilarity measures" capture information on the species' functional traits, which is ignored by traditional coefficients. Therefore, functional dissimilarity measures tend to correlate more strongly with ecosystem-level processes, as species influence these processes via their traits. In this study, we introduce a new family of dissimilarity measures for presence and absence data, which consider functional dissimilarities among species in the calculation of the matching/mismatching components of the 2 × 2 contingency table. Within this family, the behavior of the Jaccard coefficient, together with its additive components, species replacement, and richness difference, is examined by graphical comparisons and ordinations based on simulated data.
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Biology University of Rome "La Sapienza" Piazzale Aldo Moro 5 00185 Rome Italy.
authors.forename: Carlo
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ricotta
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant Systematics, Ecology and Theoretical Biology MTA-ELTE-MTM Ecology Research Group Institute of Biology L. Eötvös University Pázmány P. s. 1/C H-1117 Budapest Hungary.
authors.forename: János
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Podani
authors.affiliation: Centre d'Ecologie et des Sciences de la Conservation (CESCO UMR7204) Sorbonne Universités, MNHN, CNRS, UPMC CP51, 55-61 rue Buffon Paris France.
authors.forename: Sandrine
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pavoine
keywords: Between‐species dissimilarities; contingency table; functional excess; functional turnover; species richness