Ecological plasticity governs ecosystem services in multilayer networks

Clare Gray,Sandrine Petit,Orla Mclaughlin,Guy Woodward,Athen Ma,David A Bohan

doi:10.1038/s42003-020-01547-3

Abstract

Agriculture is under pressure to achieve sustainable development goals for biodiversity and ecosystem services. Services in agro-ecosystems are typically driven by key species, and changes in the community composition and species abundance can have multifaceted effects. Assessment of individual services overlooks co-variance between different, but related, services coupled by a common group of species. This partial view ignores how effects propagate through an ecosystem. We conduct an analysis of 374 agricultural multilayer networks of two related services of weed seed regulation and gastropod mollusc predation delivered by carabid beetles. We found that weed seed regulation increased with the herbivore predation interaction frequency, computed from the network of trophic links between carabids and weed seeds in the herbivore layer. Weed seed regulation and herbivore interaction frequencies declined as the interaction frequencies between carabids and molluscs in the carnivore layer increased. This suggests that carabids can switch to gastropod predation with community change, and that link turnover rewires the herbivore and carnivore network layers affecting seed regulation. Our study reveals that ecosystem services are governed by ecological plasticity in structurally complex, multi-layer networks. Sustainable management therefore needs to go beyond the autecological approaches to ecosystem services that predominate, particularly in agriculture.

Highlights

Agriculture is under pressure to achieve sustainable development goals for biodiversity and ecosystem services
We analyse the interlayer dynamics between weed and pest Ecosystem services (ES) using data from the Farm Scale Evaluations (FSE) of genetically modified, herbicide-tolerant crops in which ecosystem functions were measured at multiple sites at the Great Britain, national scale[23] (“Methods”)
We tested whether weed seedbank regulation co-varies with pest gastropod mollusc predation, by including the trophic interactions between the carabids and the gastropod molluscs in the carnivore layer

Summary

Introduction

Agriculture is under pressure to achieve sustainable development goals for biodiversity and ecosystem services. The multilayer network approach, as we use it, allows us to consider weed seed regulation and pest predation as two otherwise simple trophic networks, the layers, whose interaction can be analysed by the consideration of the carabid nodes that are shared.

Results

Conclusion