Topic
Species richness
About: Species richness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 61672 publications have been published within this topic receiving 2183796 citations.
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TL;DR: In the past 160 years, woody plants have been increasing in density, cover and biomass in grassland communities as discussed by the authors and this is not a new phenomenon, but has been going on continually as the climate of the Planet has changed.
502 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a systematic literature review was undertaken to analyse the linkages between different biodiversity attributes and 11 ecosystem services, and the majority of relationships between attributes and ecosystem services cited in the 530 studies were positive.
Abstract: A systematic literature review was undertaken to analyse the linkages between different biodiversity attributes and 11 ecosystem services. The majority of relationships between attributes and ecosystem services cited in the 530 studies were positive. For example, the services of water quality regulation, water flow regulation, mass flow regulation and landscape aesthetics were improved by increases in community and habitat area. Functional traits, such as richness and diversity, also displayed a predominantly positive relationship across the services, most commonly discussed for atmospheric regulation, pest regulation and pollination. A number of studies also discussed a positive correlation with stand age, particularly for atmospheric regulation. Species level traits were found to benefit a number of ecosystem services, with species abundance being particularly important for pest regulation, pollination and recreation, and species richness for timber production and freshwater fishing. Instances of biodiversity negatively affecting the examined ecosystem services were few in number for all ecosystem services, except freshwater provision. The review showed that ecosystem services are generated from numerous interactions occurring in complex systems. However, improving understanding of at least some of the key relationships between biodiversity and service provision will help guide effective management and protection strategies.
501 citations
TL;DR: This study provides new insights into the general mechanisms that link biodiversity to ecosystem functioning in natural animal communities and suggests that the observed responses were due to the identity and dominance patterns of the trait composition rather than the number or abundance of species per se.
Abstract: Drastic biodiversity declines have raised concerns about the deterioration of ecosystem functions and have motivated much recent research on the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem functioning. A functional trait framework has been proposed to improve the mechanistic understanding of this relationship, but this has rarely been tested for organisms other than plants. We analysed eight datasets, including five animal groups, to examine how well a trait-based approach, compared with a more traditional taxonomic approach, predicts seven ecosystem functions below- and above-ground. Trait-based indices consistently provided greater explanatory power than species richness or abundance. The frequency distributions of single or multiple traits in the community were the best predictors of ecosystem functioning. This implies that the ecosystem functions we investigated were underpinned by the combination of trait identities (i.e. single-trait indices) and trait complementarity (i.e. multi-trait indices) in the communities. Our study provides new insights into the general mechanisms that link biodiversity to ecosystem functioning in natural animal communities and suggests that the observed responses were due to the identity and dominance patterns of the trait composition rather than the number or abundance of species per se.
501 citations
TL;DR: It is suggested that the distributions of species within a region reveal more about the processes that generate diversity patterns than does the co‐occurrence of species at any given point.
Abstract: In this essay, I argue that the seemingly indestructible concept of the community as a local, interacting assemblage of species has hindered progress toward understanding species richness at local to regional scales. I suggest that the distributions of species within a region reveal more about the processes that generate diversity patterns than does the co‐occurrence of species at any given point. The local community is an epiphenomenon that has relatively little explanatory power in ecology and evolutionary biology. Local coexistence cannot provide insight into the ecogeographic distributions of species within a region, from which local assemblages of species derive, nor can local communities be used to test hypotheses concerning the origin, maintenance, and regulation of species richness, either locally or regionally. Ecologists are moving toward a community concept based on interactions between populations over a continuum of spatial and temporal scales within entire regions, including the po...
500 citations
TL;DR: The results suggest that accessibility to colonists plays an important role in deter- mining understory composition of successional stands, and medium- and long-range migration appears to be an issue of seed and spore dispersal rather than vegetative propagation.
Abstract: The understory flora of successional forest in the Delaware/Pennsylvania Piedmont zone (USA) is species poor relative to old regrowth stands in the region. Im- poverishment may reflect (a) limitations on dispersal of potential colonists, or (b) the unsuitability of successional stands for establishment. To examine the importance of dis- persal, herb and shrub distributions were surveyed in successional stands of varying age and spatial arrangement. In successional stands contiguous with species-rich old-regrowth forest, understory species richness declined with distance into the successional stands, implying contagion across the old-regrowth ecotone. Individual species showed evidence of contagion in 67% of site x species combinations. Mean rates of migration ranged from no measurable movement (e.g., Carex laxiflora, Cimicifuga racemosa) to >2 m/yr in some species (e.g., Galium aparine, Potentilla canadensis). Significant differences in rate of migration were observed among seed dispersal modes: ingested > adhesive > wind - ants - none. By contrast, there were no significant differences in rate between clonal and exclusively sexual species. In stands disjunct from old regrowth, the understory was species poor relative to old- regrowth forest due to a lack of species dispersed by ants and spores and those with no obvious dispersal vector. Understory species richness was greater in older disjunct stands and in stands closer to potential sources of propagules than in young and isolated stands, trends that were also noted in distributions of individual species. These results suggest that accessibility to colonists plays an important role in deter- mining understory composition of successional stands. Medium- and long-range migration appears to be an issue of seed and spore dispersal rather than vegetative propagation. The extremely low migration rates of some species threaten their continued existence in the second-growth forest landscape.
499 citations