An improved model to predict the effects of changing biodiversity levels on ecosystem function
John Connolly,Thomas Bell,Thomas Bolger,Caroline Brophy,Timothee Carnus,Timothee Carnus,John A. Finn,Laura Kirwan,Forest Isbell,Jonathan M. Levine,Andreas Lüscher,Valentin Picasso,Christiane Roscher,Maria-Teresa Sebastià,Matthias Suter,Alexandra Weigelt +15 more
TLDR
It is shown that Generalized Diversity-Interactions models quantitatively integrate several methods that separately address effects of species richness, evenness and composition on ecosystem function, and serve to unify the modelling of BEF relationships.Abstract:
Summary 1. The development of models of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF) has advanced rapidly over the last 20 years, incorporating insights gained through extensive experimental work. We propose Generalised Diversity-Interactions models that include many of the features of existing models and have several novel features. Generalised Diversity-Interactions models characterise the contribution of two species to ecosystem function as being proportional to the product of their relative abundances raised to the power of a coefficient h. 2. A value of h < 1 corresponds to a stronger than expected contribution of species’ pairs to ecosystem functioning, particularly at low relative abundance of species. 3. Varying the value of h has profound consequences for community-level properties of BEF relationships, including: (i) saturation properties of the BEF relationship; (ii) the stability of ecosystem function across communities; (iii) the likelihood of transgressive overyielding. 4. For low values of h, loss of species can have a much greater impact on ecosystem functioning than loss of community evenness. 5. Generalised Diversity-Interactions models serve to unify the modelling of BEF relationships as they include several other current models as special cases. 6. Generalised Diversity-Interactions models were applied to seven data sets and three functions: total biomass (five grassland experiments), community respiration (one bacterial experiment) and nitrate leaching (one earthworm experiment). They described all the nonrandom structure in the data in six experiments, and most of it in the seventh experiment and so fit as well or better than competing BEF models for these data. They were significantly better than Diversity-Interactions models in five experiments. 7. Synthesis. We show that Generalized Diversity-Interactions models quantitatively integrate several methods that separately address effects of species richness, evenness and composition on ecosystem function. They describe empirical data at least as well as alternative models and improve the ability to quantitatively test among several theoretical and practical hypotheses about the effects ofread more
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Potential of legume-based grassland–livestock systems in Europe: a review
Andreas Lüscher,Irene Mueller-Harvey,Jean-François Soussana,Robert M. Rees,Jean-Louis Peyraud +4 more
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Forest Isbell,Paul R. Adler,Nico Eisenhauer,Dario A. Fornara,Kaitlin Kimmel,Claire Kremen,Deborah K. Letourneau,Matt Liebman,H. Wayne Polley,Sandra Quijas,Michael Scherer-Lorenzen +10 more
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Ecosystem function enhanced by combining four functional types of plant species in intensively managed grassland mixtures: a 3‐year continental‐scale field experiment
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Evolution of species interactions determines microbial community productivity in new environments
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References
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