Waterbirds have a major functional role in wetlands, and understanding how functional traits of waterbirds depend on environmental characteristics can facilitate management of ecosystems and their services. We investigate how the waterbird community in a Neotropical river-floodplain system responds to environmental gradients, identifying how they affect waterbird species richness, functional diversity (measured as functional dispersion) and functional composition (specific functional traits). We sampled 22 lakes in the Upper Paraná floodplain system in southern Brazil, and modelled avian functional diversity and species richness as a function of environmental variables. Then we used a unified RLQ and fourth-corner analysis to evaluate environment-trait relationships. Waterbird species richness and functional diversity varied according to different environmental variables. Lake area and diversity of aquatic vegetation were associated with avian species richness, while relative abundance of grass and emergent macrophytes and mean and variation of depth were related to functional diversity. Furthermore, changes in functional diversity seemed to be mainly driven by presence of species that depend on perches for foraging (e.g. kingfishers, cormorants, and kites), whose presence was mainly associated with deep water and emergent macrophytes. Nevertheless, changes in functional diversity and functional composition did not depend on exactly the same set of environmental variables, suggesting that trait combinations (e.g. below surface feeders who feed on fish), not only specific traits, are important drivers of the variation in functional diversity between lakes. Given the observed differences in responses of species richness and functional diversity, both these diversity metrics should be used as complementary tools in ecosystem management. Furthermore, our results show that functional diversity and composition are partially coupled, suggesting that although functional diversity is influenced by the environmental filtering of particular traits, it also reflects other ecological mechanisms (e.g. competitive interactions among species).

Ecological restoration of aquatic ecosystems has become widespread in recent decades. Although the recovery of biodiversity in restored wetlands has been studied from a taxonomic perspective, our knowledge of how functional biodiversity recovers remains poorly understood. We studied the functional diversity of macroinvertebrate communities in 32 Mediterranean temporary ponds 6–7 years after their creation during a restoration in South‐West Spain, and compared them with 10 natural reference sites during two consecutive hydroperiods. We compared alpha functional diversity indices, and the individual contributions of new ponds and reference sites to the regional functional beta diversity, as well as to its turnover and nestedness components. We also investigated the influence of environmental and spatial variables on the dissimilarities of functional beta diversity and its components between new ponds and reference sites. Alpha functional diversity in new ponds was lower than in reference sites. Although the contribution of new ponds to the regional functional beta diversity was similar to that of reference sites, the latter contributed more to functional turnover while new ponds contributed more to functional nestedness. Dispersal limitation coupled with environmental filtering structured the functional variation in communities between new ponds and reference sites, but their relative importance differed between beta components. New ponds can hold species with unique functional compositions, but their contribution to the regional functional beta diversity was mostly due to trait losses with respect to reference sites. Synthesis and applications. Considering different aspects of functional diversity of invertebrate communities can help elucidate the processes and mechanisms through which ecosystems recover following restoration. We encourage the use of trait‐based approaches to identify trends in processes and patterns that can guide future wetland restoration projects.

A decline in species number often occurs after forest fragmentation and habitat loss, which usually results in the loss of ecological functions and a reduction in functional diversity in the forest fragments. However, it is uncertain whether these lost ecological functions are consistently maintained throughout continuous forests, and so the importance of these functions in continuous forests remains unknown. Point counts were used to assess both the taxonomic and functional diversity of specialist and generalist birds from sampling in a continuous primary forest compared with forest fragments in order to investigate the responses of these groups to forest fragmentation. We also measured alpha and beta diversity. The responses of specialists and generalists were similar when we assessed all bird species but were different when only passerines were considered. When examining passerines we found lower total taxonomic beta diversity for specialists than for generalists in the continuous forest, while taxonomic beta diversity was higher in the fragmented forest and similar between bird groups. However, total functional beta‐diversity values indicated clearly higher trait regularity in continuous forest for specialists and higher trait regularity in fragments for generalists. Specialists showed significantly higher functional alpha diversity in comparison with generalists in the continuous forest, while both groups showed similar values in fragments. In passerines, species richness and alpha functional diversity of both specialist and generalist were explained by forest connectivity; but, only fragment size explained those parameters for specialist passerines. We suggest that considering subsets of the community with high similarity among species, as passerines, provides a better tool for understanding responses to forest fragmentation. Due to the regularity of specialists in continuous forest, their lost could highly affect functionality in forest fragments.