Plant Functional Types in Coastal Dune Habitats

Most living organisms have evolved through a hazardous sequence of expansion to new areas, new environments and communities, coupled with extinction in the original habitats and in some of the newly settled areas.All current biological traits, either morphological or physiological, play or have played their role in the evolutionary line. Focusing on functional traits helps us to understand biological systems in ecological terms.

The use of functional types (FT), or functional groups (FG), as opposed to taxonomic entities, emphasises physiological vs.morphological characters as a basis for species association in “natural” groups.However, a proper conceptual construction of either FT or FG is not yet available, and definitions only address certain topics (Semenova and van der Maarel 2000).