Aim: Plant functional groups are widely used in community ecology and earth system modelling to describe trait variation within and across plant communities. However, this approach rests on the assumption that functional groups explain a large proportion of trait variation among species. We test whether four commonly used plant functional groups represent variation in six ecologically important plant traits. Location: Tundra biome. Time period: Data collected between 1964 and 2016. Major taxa studied: 295 tundra vascular plant species. Methods: We compiled a database of six plant traits (plant height, leaf area, specific leaf area, leaf dry matter content, leaf nitrogen, seed mass) for tundra species. We examined the variation in species-level trait expression explained by four traditional functional groups (evergreen shrubs, deciduous shrubs, graminoids, forbs), and whether variation explained was dependent upon the traits included in analysis. We further compared the explanatory power and species composition of functional groups to alternative classifications generated using post hoc clustering of species-level traits. Results: Traditional functional groups explained significant differences in trait expression, particularly amongst traits associated with resource economics, which were consistent across sites and at the biome scale. However, functional groups explained 19% of overall trait variation and poorly represented differences in traits associated with plant size. Post hoc classification of species did not correspond well with traditional functional groups, and explained twice as much variation in species-level trait expression. Main conclusions: Traditional functional groups only coarsely represent variation in well-measured traits within tundra plant communities, and better explain resource economic traits than size-related traits. We recommend caution when using functional group approaches to predict tundra ecosystem change, or ecosystem functions relating to plant size, such as albedo or carbon storage. We argue that alternative classifications or direct use of specific plant traits could provide new insight into ecological prediction and modelling.

We quantify uncertainties in the location and magnitude of extreme pressure spots revealed from large scale multiphase flow simulations of cloud cavitation collapse. We examine clouds containing 500 cavities and quantify uncertainties related to their initial spatial arrangement. The resulting 2,000-dimensional space is sampled using a nonintrusive and computationally efficient multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methodology. We introduce novel empirically optimal control variate coefficients to enhance the variance reduction in MLMC. The proposed multilevel control variates Monte Carlo leads to more than two orders of magnitude speedup when compared to standard Monte Carlo methods. We identify large uncertainties in the location and magnitude of the peak pressure pulse and present its statistical correlations and joint probability density functions with the geometrical characteristics of the cloud. Characteristic properties of spatial cloud structure are identified as potential causes of significant uncertainties in exerted collapse pressures.