Abstract
The regional controls of biodiversity patterns have been traditionally evaluated using structural and compositional components at the species level, but evaluation of the functional component at the ecosystem level is still scarce. During the last decades, the role of ecosystem functioning in management and conservation has increased. Our aim was to use satellite-derived Ecosystem Functional Types (EFTs, patches of the land-surface with similar carbon gain dynamics) to characterize the regional patterns of ecosystem functional diversity and to evaluate the environmental and human controls that determine EFT richness across natural and human-modified systems in temperate South America. The EFT identification was based on three descriptors of carbon gain dynamics derived from seasonal curves of the MODIS Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI): annual mean (surrogate of primary production), seasonal coefficient of variation (indicator of seasonality) and date of maximum EVI (descriptor of phenology). As observed for species richness in the southern hemisphere, water availability, not energy, emerged as the main climatic driver of EFT richness in natural areas of temperate South America. In anthropogenic areas, the role of both water and energy decreased and increasing human intervention increased richness at low levels of human influence, but decreased richness at high levels of human influence.
Highlights
The biodiversity of an area is comprised of three components—composition, structure and function—evaluated at all levels of the biological hierarchy, from genes to ecoregions [1].Composition deals with the identity and variety of entities in a collection; structure is the physical organization or pattern of a system; and function involves ecological and evolutionary processes [1]
The definition and coding of Ecosystem Functional Types (EFTs) allow for an ecological interpretation of the legend in terms of the three Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) metrics related to productivity (EVI_Mean), seasonality (EVI_sCV)
Satellite-derived time-series of the Enhanced Vegetation Index were used to quantify the spatial patterns of ecosystem functional diversity in temperate South America through the identification of 64 Ecosystem Functional Types (EFTs), defined as ecological entities that have similar properties and dynamics of primary production
Summary
The biodiversity of an area is comprised of three components—composition, structure and function—evaluated at all levels of the biological hierarchy, from genes to ecoregions [1].Composition deals with the identity and variety of entities in a collection (e.g., species lists and diversity indices); structure is the physical organization or pattern of a system (e.g., habitat complexity or physiognomy of vegetation); and function involves ecological and evolutionary processes (e.g., information, matter and energy exchanges) [1]. The ecosystem functioning dimension of biodiversity has gained attention given that global change effects on biodiversity are noticeable at the ecosystem level [4] and have a faster influence on functional than on structural or compositional characteristics of ecosystems [5,6]. Both bottom-up and top-down strategies have been developed to characterize the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of ecosystem functioning based on the concept of Ecosystem Functional Types, i.e., patches of the land-surface that exchange energy and matter in a similar way and show coordinated and specified responses to environmental factors [7,8]
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