Abstract
Biodiversity of ecosystems is an important driver for the supply of ecosystem services to people. Soils often have a larger biodiversity per unit surface area than what can be observed aboveground. Here, we present what is to our knowledge, the most extensive literature-based key-word assessment of the existing information about the relationships between belowground biodiversity and ecosystem services in European forests. The belowground diversity of plant roots, fungi, prokaryota, soil fauna, and protists was evaluated in relation to the supply of Provisioning, Regulating, Cultural, and Supporting Services. The soil biota were divided into 14 subgroups and the ecosystem services into 37 separate services. Out of the 518 possible combinations of biotic groups and ecosystem services, no published study was found for 374 combinations (72%). Of the remaining 144 combinations (28%) where relationships were found, the large majority (87%) showed a positive relationship between biodiversity of a belowground biotic group and an associated ecosystem service. However, for the majority of the combinations (102) there were only three or fewer studies. The percentage of cases for which a relationship was detected varied strongly between ecosystem service categories with 23% for Provisioning, 8% for Regulating, 40% for Cultural, and 48% for Supporting Services. We conclude that (1) soil biodiversity is generally positively related to ecosystem services in European forests; (2) the links between soil biodiversity and Cultural or Supporting services are better documented than those relating to Provisioning and Regulating services; (3) there is a huge knowledge gap for most possible combinations of soil biota and ecosystem services regarding how a more biodiverse soil biota is associated with a given ecosystem service. Given the drastically increasing societal demand for knowledge of the role of biodiversity in the functioning of ecosystems and the supply of ecosystem services, we strongly encourage the scientific community to conduct well-designed studies incorporating the belowground diversity and the functions and services associated with this diversity.
Highlights
In the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA, 2005) framework, ecosystem services (ES) represent the wide range of benefits ecosystems provide to people
Our review of European literature showed that the majority of the studies reviewed found positive effects of belowground biodiversity and ecosystem services in forests (Figure 5), with the exception of fungi and Regulating Services and Regulating Services and protists
Less data were available for smaller taxa than for the other groupings and, in several biotic groupings, the use of key species was more common than the evaluation of biodiversity within those groupings
Summary
In the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA, 2005) framework, ecosystem services (ES) represent the wide range of benefits ecosystems provide to people. Following this typology, the benefits here encompass goods, such as timber, food, and fuel (“Provisioning Services”), and ecosystems’ abilities to purify air and water, to reduce flood risk, and to regulate pollination and carbon sequestration (“Regulating Services”). Inspired by the cascade framework proposed by Haines-Young and Potschin (2010), Maes et al (2013) proposed to present the services in three categories rather than four by regrouping “Regulating” and “Supporting Services” (MEA, 2005) together as “Regulating and maintenance services”. Even though one could be against the use of an anthropocentric definition of natural capital in an ES framework (Silvertown, 2015), the concept of ecosystem service clusters (de Bello et al, 2010) and the risk of double counting should be considered while using the MEA’s typology
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