Semi-natural grasslands form multifunctional areas susceptible to serve the society from many aspects. Indeed, they are agro-ecosystems that promote expression of a large floristic and faunistic diversity, which allows conciliating ecologic and agronomic issues. This PhD work aims at analysing (i) influence of environmental factors on natural communities' assembly rules and (ii) the relationships between the functional structure of assemblages (i.e. community weighted mean trait values and functional diversity) and their performances (i.e. biomass production and its digestibility). This study is based on both experimental and field approaches in the Marais Poitevin wet grasslands. Our results show that the studied aerial and root traits display a wide diversity of answers to stress gradients and disturbances encountered in these grasslands. Our results also highlighted the crucial influence of community weighted mean trait values on provision of ecosystem services (i.e. forage productivity and digestibility), in agreement with the Biomass ratio hypothesis set out by Grime. The influence of the functional diversity level on services provided by the assemblages differs depending on the service considered. Contrary to the results expected according to the Diversity hypothesis of Tilman, the functional diversity level is negatively correlated with the productivity of the assemblages. However, our study points to a positive feedback between functional diversity and digestibility. Furthermore, this study demonstrated the existence of trade-off between the productivity of assemblages and the digestibility of biomass produced in these wet grasslands. This work suggests that highly reliable tools can be established, based on the functional structure of assemblages, to evaluate the feeding value of a vegetal cover. This work finally illustrates the agronomic benefits associated with heterogeneous vegetal covers encountered in these grasslands.
