Community assembly changes fundamentally in response to disturbance following habitat destruction due to extreme events and human activities. There are several important aspects of community assembly that can be measured in response to disturbance or during primary establishment. Of these measurable outcomes, metrics of taxonomic or species diversity (SD) are perhaps the most common and logistically the easiest to evaluate. SD is determined by species counts, often weighted by species abundance. However, it is increasingly evident that measurements of phylogenetic (PD) and functional trait (FD) diversity can also reveal important aspects of community assembly beyond inferences that can be drawn from more traditional metrics. PD is a measure of the evolutionarily relatedness of species in a community, while FD is a measure of the variability in ecosystem regulating traits among species in a community. PD requires knowledge of the gene-molecular structure of co-occurring species in a community. FD requires knowledge of species performance in terms of various characteristics of co-occurring species such as leaf or root construction costs. Both FD and PD can provide inferences on species niche relationships within a community and may also provide land managers desirable and informative metrics to measure restoration outcomes. However, it is unclear whether FD and PD are drivers or a consequence of community assembly. In this session, ecologists seeking to understand community assembly in grasslands will present studies where PD and FD is manipulated or observed and discuss how this knowledge can inform conservation and ecosystem restoration.