Figure 3.

General procedure the assessment of the effects of the imputation methods for the calculation of functional diversity indices. (A) a database without missing data was created from the LEDA database (four traits for 526 species; some replacement of missing values by the dissimilarity methods where necessary); (B) 50 relevés were randomly selected from a large set of relevés (this process was repeated 100 times); (C) 50 relevés and the trait database were crossed and functional diversity indices were computed; (D) missing data were inserted in the trait database with several percentages; (E) missing data were replaced with the dissimilarity and the relationships methods; (E) these corrected databases were crossed with the 50 relevés, and functional diversity indices were computed; (F) the indices computed from database without missing values were compared to the indices computed from the databases with replaced missing values using a Pearson's correlation test.