Understanding how ecological mechanisms influence local plant community assemblages in tropical forests and, how they vary along environmental gradients, are key questions in ecology. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain the variation in trait distribution across an environmental gradient. Furthermore, in communities with high diversity, different ecological mechanism such as limiting similarity, habitat filtering and neutrality are thought to explain species coexistence. Changes in these mechanism combined with environmental variables along these gradients help determine the shape of trait distributions and functional composition of forests; however, the specific drivers of functional diversity across space are still unclear. The aim of this project is to assess how functional trait distribution is changing along an elevational gradient in the Colombian Andean forest and which ecological mechanism is governing the functional assemblage.
