Abstract

Global change drivers are rapidly altering resource availability and biodiversity. While there is consensus that greater biodiversity increases the functioning of ecosystems, the extent to which biodiversity buffers ecosystem productivity in response to changes in resource availability remains unclear. We use data from 16 grassland experiments across North America and Europe that manipulated plant species richness and one of two essential resources—soil nutrients or water—to assess the direction and strength of the interaction between plant diversity and resource alteration on above-ground productivity and net biodiversity, complementarity, and selection effects. Despite strong increases in productivity with nutrient addition and decreases in productivity with drought, we found that resource alterations did not alter biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships. Our results suggest that these relationships are largely determined by increases in complementarity effects along plant species richness gradients. Although nutrient addition reduced complementarity effects at high diversity, this appears to be due to high biomass in monocultures under nutrient enrichment. Our results indicate that diversity and the complementarity of species are important regulators of grassland ecosystem productivity, regardless of changes in other drivers of ecosystem function.

Highlights

  • Driven environmental change presently affects a considerable proportion of Earth’s ecosystems [1] and is rapidly altering their capacity to provide the many ecosystem functions and services needed by human societies [2,3]

  • Global change drivers significantly impact on ecosystem functioning and biodiversity [4], which plays a vital role in controlling ecosystem functioning [3,5]

  • The present results show that the positive effects of biodiversity on above-ground productivity are robust to resource alterations

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Driven environmental change presently affects a considerable proportion of Earth’s ecosystems [1] and is rapidly altering their capacity to provide the many ecosystem functions and services needed by human societies [2,3]. Complementarity and selection effects for the studies that recorded species level biomass (six nutrient addition studies and three drought studies; electronic supplementary material, table S1), following Loreau & Hector [34]. For nutrient addition and drought studies, we fitted separate linear mixed-effects models that test for the effects of plant species richness, treatment and the interaction of the two on above-ground productivity. To test for the effects of plant species richness, treatment and the interaction of the two on net biodiversity, complementarity and selection effects, we fitted separate linear mixed-effects models for nutrient addition and drought studies. We tested the influence of the above-mentioned covariates by fitting separate linear mixed effects models where a fixed effect for nutrient addition or drought duration and the corresponding interactions with plant species richness and treatment were added to the original models. All analyses were performed in R v. 3.2 [39]

Results
Discussion
Conclusion
58. Fraser LH et al 2012 Coordinated distributed
59. Grace JB et al 2016 Integrative modelling reveals

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.