Table 2. The traits used.
All traits are binary except for body mass, Ph0, and Ph1. We use taxonomy as a proxy of latent traits following Mouquet et al. (2012). To do so, we used the R package ape to obtain taxonomic distances between the species, perform classical multidimensional scaling (or principal coordinates analysis) (Cox & Cox, 2001) on taxonomic distances, and use the scores of each species on the first two axes (Ph0 and Ph1) as taxonomy-based traits. These three real-valued variables are scaled to be in the [0, 1) range. For the Tanimoto similarity index, these three continuous variables have to be converted to binary features. For each, we create four binary features of equal size (n = 881∕4).
| Features | Abbr. | Description | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| AboveGroud | AG | Whether the species live above the ground. | 538 |
| Annelida | An | For species of the annelida phylum. | 34 |
| Arthropoda | Ar | For species of the arthropoda phylum. | 813 |
| Bacteria | Bc | For species of the bacteria domain. | 1 |
| BelowGround | BG | For species living below the ground. | 464 |
| Carnivore | Ca | For species eating other animals. | 481 |
| Crawls | Cr | Whether the species crawls. | 184 |
| Cyanobacteria | Cy | Member of the cyanobacteria phylum. | 1 |
| Detritivore | De | For species eating detribus. | 355 |
| Detritus | Ds | Whether the species can be classifying as a detritus. | 2 |
| Fungivore | Fg | For species eating fungi. | 111 |
| Fungi | Fu | Member of the fungi kingdom. | 2 |
| HasShell | HS | Whether the species has a shell. | 274 |
| Herbivore | He | For species eating plants. | 130 |
| Immobile | Im | For immobile species. | 85 |
| IsHard | IH | Whether the species has a though exterior (but not a shell). | 418 |
| Jumps | Ju | Whether the species can jump. | 30 |
| LongLegs | LL | For species with long legs. | 59 |
| Mollusca | Mo | Member of the mollusca phylum. | 45 |
| Nematoda | Ne | Member of the nematoda phylum. | 5 |
| Plantae | Pl | Member of the plant kinggom. | 3 |
| Protozoa | Pr | Member of the protozoa kingdom. | 3 |
| ShortLegs | SL | For species with short legs. | 538 |
| UsePoison | UP | Whether the species uses poison. | 177 |
| WebBuilder | WB | Whether the species builds webs. | 89 |
| Body mass | M | Natural logarithm of the body mass in grams | 881 |
| Ph0 | Ph0 | Coordinate on the first axis of a PCA of phylogenetic distances | 881 |
| Ph1 | Ph1 | Coordinate on the second axis of a PCA of phylogenetic distances | 881 |