Considering that assemblyprocesses acting on natural communities may differ depend-ing on the spatial scale considered, separating functionaldiversity in within-community (˛) and among-community(ˇ) components will improve the detection of all the pro-cesses acting on community assembly. Here, ˛ represents thediversity of trait values within one community, whereas ˇ rep-resents how diverse are species trait values among differentcommunities (Bryant et al., 2008; De Bello et al., 2009; Lozuponeand Knight, 2005; Swenson, 2014).