Abstract: Plants develop adaptive traits that vary at multiple scales. Traditional ecology focused mainly on interspecific variations. However, recent researches demonstrate that the degree of intraspecific variations cannot be ignored. Ignoring the intraspecific variations can result in low confidence in quantifying community assembly, ecological strategies, and niche space. By reviewing literature on intraspecific variations of plant functional traits, we identified that these variations primarily arise from genetic diversity, phenotypic plasticity, local rapid adaptation, and ontogenetic differences. The commonly used statistical approaches in the context include traitgradient analysis, coefficient of variation, variance decomposition, T statistics, and plant functional diversity. This study provides a comprehensive overview of research development of intraspecific variations in plant functional traits and the prevailing statistical methods. Additionally, we evaluated the aforementioned methods and discussed their applications and future advancements in the research of community assembly and other areas of community ecology.

Key words: plant community, habitat heterogeneity, community assembly rule