Abstract
It is essential to understand how the loss of biodiversity impacts both ecosystem function (EF) and multifunctionality (EMF). Previous studies have mostly focused on predicting how species richness (SR) impacts EMF, while the effect of functional diversity (FD) on EMF remains unclear. Specifically, we know little about the primary functional drivers impacting EMF compared with SR. Therefore, we analysed 8 ecosystem functions within 58 natural secondary forest plots to investigate the effect of FD on both individual EF and EMF. Our results suggest that SR and FD had very significant positive effects on plant phosphorus, soil available phosphorus, and soil total nitrogen. FD explained significantly more variations in these functional responses than SR for individual ecosystem functioning. We also used a multiple threshold approach to test the effect of SR and FD on EMF. We found that FD and SR were positively related to EMF regardless of whether low-level function or high-level function was desired, but FD had a larger effect than SR. Based on the averaging approach, OLS regression, multivariate linear regression model and random forest analysis, we found that SR and FD were both drivers of EMF but that FD had a stronger effect and could explain more variation. As such, we conclude that FD drives ecosystem multifunctionality more than SR.
Highlights
Biodiversity is crucial for sustaining ecosystem processes and functioning[1]
functional richness (FRic) had a significantly positive correlation with PP (r = 0.500, p < 0.01), soil available phosphorus (SAP) (r = 0.451, p < 0.01) and soil total nitrogen (STN) (r = 0.310, p < 0.05), the total amount of explained variation was higher than species richness (SR) in all cases (Table 1)
For plant nitrogen (PN), soil hydrolysable nitrogen (SHN), soil total phosphorus (STP), soil total carbon (STC) and woody plant biomass (WPB), there were no significant correlations with SR and FRic (Table 1)
Summary
Biodiversity is crucial for sustaining ecosystem processes and functioning[1]. Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate and will continue to decline over the 21st century[2]. Most of studies proved that higher biodiversity was necessary to maintain multiple ecosystem functions among different ecosystems, but little attention has been paid to subtropical forests[8,24,25,26]. We used data collected from 58 natural secondary forest plots located in Qiubei and Shuangbai County in Yunnan Province, China (Fig. 1) and examined eight individual ecosystem functions (plant nitrogen, plant phosphorus, soil hydrolysable nitrogen, soil available phosphorus, soil total nitrogen, soil total phosphorus, soil total carbon, and woody plant biomass). Plant nitrogen and plant phosphorus are considered nutrient pools in aboveground biomass[21] We used this unique dataset to address two primary questions: (1) How do SR and FD influence individual ecosystem functions?; (2) Does FD predict EMF better than SR?
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