Gastrointestinal morphology is an effective functional dietary proxy that predicts small mammal community structure.

The availability and quality of food resources can alter the intensity of competition and predation pressure within communities. Understanding species capacity to respond to global change-driven shifts in resource distribution is therefore crucial for biodiversity conservation. Small mammal communities are often structured by competition for food resources, but understanding and monitoring these processes are currently hindered by lack of functional dietary trait information in these hard-to-sample systems.

Seasonal and sex-specific changes in the gastrointestinal tracts of .

Functional traits are phenotypic characteristics that contribute to fitness of individuals in dynamic and changing environments. In mammals, both categorical and continuous (e.g.