Understanding and predicting how species traits are shaped by prevailing environmental conditions is an important yet challenging task in ecology. Functional trait based approaches can replace potentially idiosyncratic species-specific response models in learning about community behavior across environmental gradients. Customarily, models for traits given environment consider only trait means to predict species and functional diversity, as intra-taxon variability in traits is often thought to be negligible. A growing body of literature indicates that intra-taxon trait...