Session

Grassland ecosystems are characterized by high levels of plant and insect diversity. Various insect taxa are recognized as having important roles in a diverse range of ecosystem services, such as pollination, decomposition and nutrient cycling. They are also involved in many trophic interactions with plants, such as predation, parasitism, phytophagy and spermatophagy. The study of functional traits can help us to understand the role of trophic interactions and the relationship between functional diversity and species diversity. In this presentation, I will present a study on the analysis of the functional traits of a broad range of beetle taxa in a set of open and wooded urban habitats in the city of Warsaw, Poland, and discuss the use of functional data to study plant-arthropod interactions in grassland ecosystems. My approach involved the used of fuzzy data to generate a usable set of data on a comprehensive range of traits. I will discuss the implications of these results for such concepts as ecological resilience and redundancy.