No pervasive size trend in global community dynamics.

Abstract

While recent meta-analyses have suggested that local taxonomic richness has on average remained invariant, potential shifts in functional traits remain underexplored at global scales. Here, by linking the largest cross-taxa community time series database to multiple trait databases, we show that within communities there is no clear trend between size traits and changes in abundance rank over time. This suggests that there is no pervasive tendency across biomes for larger species to be doing proportionally better or worse than smaller species.