Changes in land-use and land management practices can greatly influence the suite of species able to persist in a particular area.  Understanding how these changes in species composition translate into changes in the functional composition of communities and consequently the ecological services these communities provide to society remains an important challenge.  Here we assess changing temporal and spatial patterns in avian functional diversity across 620 sites nested within the human-influenced landscapes of rural France.  Avian assemblages included the 105 most-common terrestrial bird species across France.  For each species we characterized 13 composite life history and morphological traits related to diet, foraging behavior, habitat preferences, reproductive output, and migratory tendency.  The functional diversity of each avian assemblage was quantified using three metrics: functional richness (the volume of multi-dimensional trait space occupied by each assemblage), functional evenness (the regularity of the distribution of species within trait space), and functional divergence (a measure of the distribution of species abundance within trait space).
Results/Conclusions

Our results show that changes in species composition do not necessarily lead to concomitant changes in trait composition and the functioning of ecosystems.