Week 3 assignment functional diversity

[rvosa]

In week 3 the general focus is on phylogenetic and functional diversity. If we make week 2's assignment about the niches of domesticated animals (ungulates), then week 3 should be about the functional diversity of crop plants.

[rvosa]

Nope, we do the opposite: functional diversity of ungulates. The plan is as follows:

1. given functional traits of ungulates, we can calculate the Gower distances between them. We can visualize these as a dendrogram (e.g. obtained by NJ). If domesticated ungulates are functionally similar, we would expect their average pairwise distances to be smaller than their evolutionary distances.
2. again, given functional traits of ungulate, we can apply phylogenetic generalized linear modeling, such that the state of being domesticated is the dependent variable, and the functional traits are the components of the model (e.g. is_domesticated~group_structure+biome+diet_width). This will tell us which traits most influence the dependent variable.