Multi‐taxon inventory reveals highly consistent biodiversity responses to ecospace variation

Ane Kirstine Brunbjerg,Lars Dalby,Aimée T Classen,Oskar Liset Pryds Hansen,Jens‐Christian Svenning,Toke Thomas Høye,Jesper Erenskjold Moeslund,Camilla Fløjgaard,Tobias G Frøslev,Rasmus Ejrnæs,Hans Henrik Bruun

doi:10.1111/oik.07145

Ane Kirstine Brunbjerg, Lars Dalby + Show 9 more

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https://doi.org/10.1111/oik.07145

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Abstract

Amidst the global biodiversity crisis, identifying general principles for variation of biodiversity remains a key challenge. Scientific consensus is limited to a few macroecological rules, such as species richness increasing with area, which provide limited guidance for conservation. In fact, few agreed ecological principles apply at the scale of sites or reserve management, partly because most community‐level studies are restricted to single habitat types and species groups. We used the recently proposed ecospace framework and a comprehensive data set for aggregating environmental variation to predict multi‐taxon diversity. We studied richness of plants, fungi and arthropods in 130 sites representing the major terrestrial habitat types in Denmark. We found the abiotic environment (ecospace position) to be pivotal for the richness of primary producers (vascular plants, mosses and lichens) and, more surprisingly, little support for ecospace continuity as a driver. A peak in richness at intermediate productivity adds new empirical evidence to a long‐standing debate over biodiversity responses to productivity. Finally, we discovered a dominant and positive response of fungi and insect richness to organic matter accumulation and diversification (ecospace expansion). Two simple models of producer and consumer richness accounted for 77% of the variation in multi‐taxon species richness suggesting a significant potential for generalization beyond individual species responses. Our study widens the traditional conservation focus on vegetation and vertebrate populations unravelling the importance of diversification of carbon resources for diverse heterotrophs, such as fungi and insects.

Highlights

Ecologists have struggled to understand and explain spatial and temporal variation in biodiversity, with increasing societal attention motivated by the global biodiversity crisis
The ecological species pool index reveals that there are more vascular plants in the Danish flora which prefer relatively high incoming light, intermediate soil moisture and relatively high soil pH (Fig. S1)
We found very few significant effects of within-site heterogeneity on species richness indicating that these were of little importance compared to the effects of between-site variability (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Ecologists have struggled to understand and explain spatial and temporal variation in biodiversity, with increasing societal attention motivated by the global biodiversity crisis. The disappointing conclusion has been somewhat contradicted or modified lately by studies showing promising potential for cross-taxon congruence in species composition and compositional turnover (β-diversity) [8] and for species richness, but only after accounting for environmental variation [3, 9]. Along this line of reasoning, we set out to test the hypothesis that terrestrial multi-taxon diversity can be predicted across contrasting environments without detailed consideration of an intractable diversity of taxonomic groups, response groups or habitat types. We are not testing the surrogacy hypothesis per se, but rather the idea that multi-taxon diversity can be predicted from a low-dimensional ecological space, ignoring the possible multitude of response shapes of the individual taxonomic groups or species

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