Former AEL postdocs James Sinclair and Mike Fraker along with AEL faculty Jim Hood and Stu Ludsin as well as other collaborators have a new article out in Global Change Biology entitled, Functional traits reveal the dominant drivers of long-term community change across a North American Great Lake. 

In ecosystems perturbed by multiple simultaneous stressors, discerning which individual or set of stressors is driving community structure is oftentimes difficult. Our results illustrate how supplementing species-based approaches with trait-based ones can help to resolve this issue. 

Sinclair, J.S., M.E. Fraker, J.M. Hood, K.T. Frank, M.R. DuFour, A.M. Gorman, and S.A. Ludsin. 2021. Functional traits reveal the dominant drivers of long-term community change across a North American Great Lake. Global Change Biology 27(23): 6232-6251. doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15902