12 Facts About Functional ecology

Functional ecology is a branch of ecology that focuses on the roles, or functions, that species play in the community or ecosystem in which they occur.

Functional ecology often emphasizes an integrative approach, using organism traits and activities to understand community dynamics and ecosystem processes, particularly in response to the rapid global changes occurring in earth's environment.

Functional ecology sits at the nexus of several disparate disciplines and serves as the unifying principle between evolutionary ecology, evolutionary biology, genetics and genomics, and traditional ecological studies.

Functional ecology became widely understood to be the study of ecological processes that concern the adaptations of organism within the ecosystem.

Functional ecology diversity was conceived as an alternative classification to schemes using genetic diversity or physiological diversity to measure the ecological importance of species in an environment, as well as a way to understand how biodiversity affects specific ecosystem functions, where in this context, 'biodiversity' refers to the diversity of ecosystem functions present in a given system.

Key interest of modern research in Functional Ecology is the impact of functional diversity on ecosystem health.

Notions of functional ecology have beneficial implications for species detection and classification.

Genomic Functional ecology can classify traits on cellular and physiological levels leading to a more refined classification system.

Reverse Functional ecology can contribute to better taxonomy of organisms as well.

Functional ecology has broad applications to the science of and debate over de-extinction, the resurrection of extinct species.

Function Functional ecology can be applied to strategically assess the resurrection of extinct species to maximize its impact on an environment.

Functional ecology extinction is defined as "the point at which a species fails to perform its historical functional role".