Functional classification of plants by multivariate analysis

A plant functional type is defined as a group of plants that, irrespective of phylogeny, are similar in a given set of traits and similar in their association to certain variables, which may be factors to which the plants are responding or effects of the plants in the ecosystem. A special case of a plant functional type is an ecological-coenotic plant species group, the most used in Russia. We review methods used for the analysis of plant functional type data and describe our approach combining expert knowledge and multivariate statistical methods into a single procedure to search and test of ecological-coenotic plant species groups defined a priori.