The most unique feature of Earth is the existence of life, and the most extraordinary feature of life is its diversity. Approximately 9 million types of plants, animals, protists and fungi inhabit the Earth. So, too, do 7 billion people. Two decades ago, at the first Earth Summit, the vast majority of the world's nations declared that human actions were dismantling the Earth's ecosystems, eliminating genes, species and biological traits at an alarming rate. This observation led to the question of how such loss of biological diversity will alter the functioning of ecosystems and their ability to provide society with the goods and services needed to prosper.

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Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity

Species diversity is a major determinant of ecosystem productivity, stability, invasibility, and nutrient dynamics. Hundreds of studies spanning terrestrial, aquatic, and marine ecosystems show that high-diversity mixtures are approximately twice as productive as monocultures of the same species and that this difference increases through time. These impacts of higher diversity have multiple causes, including interspecific complementarity, greater use of limiting resources, decreased herbivory and disease, and nutrient-cycling feedbacks that increase nutrient stores and supply rates over the long term. These experimentally observed effects of diversity are consistent with predictions based on a variety of theories that share a common feature: All have trade-off-based mechanisms that allow long-term coexistence of many different competing species. Diversity loss has an effect as great as, or greater than, the effects of herbivory, fire, drought, nitrogen addition, elevated CO2, and other drivers of environm...

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Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning

Biodiversity loss has become a global concern as evidence accumulates that it will negatively affect ecosystem services on which society depends. So far, most studies have focused on the ecological consequences of above-ground biodiversity loss; yet a large part of Earth’s biodiversity is literally hidden below ground. Whether reductions of biodiversity in soil communities below ground have consequences for the overall performance of an ecosystem remains unresolved. It is important to investigate this in view of recent observations that soil biodiversity is declining and that soil communities are changing upon land use intensification. We established soil communities differing in composition and diversity and tested their impact on eight ecosystem functions in model grassland communities. We show that soil biodiversity loss and simplification of soil community composition impair multiple ecosystem functions, including plant diversity, decomposition, nutrient retention, and nutrient cycling. The average response of all measured ecosystem functions (ecosystem multifunctionality) exhibited a strong positive linear relationship to indicators of soil biodiversity, suggesting that soil community composition is a key factor in regulating ecosystem functioning. Our results indicate that changes in soil communities and the loss of soil biodiversity threaten ecosystem multifunctionality and sustainability.

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Soil biodiversity and soil community composition determine ecosystem multifunctionality

Despite the importance of microbial communities for ecosystem services and human welfare, the relationship between microbial diversity and multiple ecosystem functions and services (that is, multifunctionality) at the global scale has yet to be evaluated. Here we use two independent, large-scale databases with contrasting geographic coverage (from 78 global drylands and from 179 locations across Scotland, respectively), and report that soil microbial diversity positively relates to multifunctionality in terrestrial ecosystems. The direct positive effects of microbial diversity were maintained even when accounting simultaneously for multiple multifunctionality drivers (climate, soil abiotic factors and spatial predictors). Our findings provide empirical evidence that any loss in microbial diversity will likely reduce multifunctionality, negatively impacting the provision of services such as climate regulation, soil fertility and food and fibre production by terrestrial ecosystems.

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Microbial diversity drives multifunctionality in terrestrial ecosystems

Forests are of major importance to human society, contributing several crucial ecosystem services. Biodiversity is suggested to positively influence multiple services but evidence from natural systems at scales relevant to management is scarce. Here, across a scale of 400,000 km2, we report that tree species richness in production forests shows positive to positively hump-shaped relationships with multiple ecosystem services. These include production of tree biomass, soil carbon storage, berry production and game production potential. For example, biomass production was approximately 50% greater with five than with one tree species. In addition, we show positive relationships between tree species richness and proxies for other biodiversity components. Importantly, no single tree species was able to promote all services, and some services were negatively correlated to each other. Management of production forests will therefore benefit from considering multiple tree species to sustain the full range of benefits that the society obtains from forests.

Higher levels of multiple ecosystem services are found in forests with more tree species, Suppl info

Fernando T. Maestre,* Jose L. Quero, Nicholas J. Gotelli, Adrian Escudero, Victoria Ochoa, Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo, Miguel Garcia-Gomez, Matthew A. Bowker, Santiago Soliveres, Cristina Escolar, Pablo Garcia-Palacios, Miguel Berdugo, Enrique Valencia, Beatriz Gozalo, Antonio Gallardo, Lorgio Aguilera, Tulio Arredondo, Julio Blones, Bertrand Boeken, Donaldo Bran, Abel A. Conceicao, Omar Cabrera, Mohamed Chaieb, Mchich Derak, David J. Eldridge, Carlos I. Espinosa, Adriana Florentino, Juan Gaitan, M. Gabriel Gatica, Wahida Ghiloufi, Susana Gomez-Gonzalez, Julio R. Gutierrez, Rosa M. Hernandez, Xuewen Huang, Elisabeth Huber-Sannwald, Mohammad Jankju, Maria Miriti, Jorge Monerris, Rebecca L. Mau, Ernesto Morici, Kamal Naseri, Abelardo Ospina, Vicente Polo, Anibal Prina, Eduardo Pucheta, David A. Ramirez-Collantes, Roberto Romao, Matthew Tighe, Cristian Torres-Diaz, James Val, Jose P. Veiga, Deli Wang, Eli Zaady

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M. Gabriel Gatica

Papers

Supporting Online Material for Plant Species Richness and Ecosystem Multifunctionality in Global Drylands