Abstract
Ensuring reliable supply of services from nature is key to the sustainable development and well-being of human societies. Varied and frequently complex relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem services have, however, frustrated our capacity to quantify and predict the vulnerability of those services to species extinctions. Here, we use a qualitative Boolean modelling framework to identify universal drivers of the robustness of ecosystem service supply to species loss. These drivers comprise simple features of the networks that link species to the functions they perform that, in turn, underpin a service. Together, they define what we call network fragility. Using data from >250 real ecological networks representing services such as pollination and seed-dispersal, we demonstrate that network fragility predicts remarkably well the robustness of empirical ecosystem services. We then show how to quantify contributions of individual species to ecosystem service robustness, enabling quantification of how vulnerability scales from species to services. Our findings provide general insights into the way species, functional traits, and the links between them together determine the vulnerability of ecosystem service supply to biodiversity loss.
Highlights
Ensuring reliable supply of services from nature is key to the sustainable development and well-being of human societies
Traits are functional features that can be shared among species, as can be visualised by drawing, for a given service, a bipartite network linking species to traits[19] (Figs. 1a and 2, but note that we could, in principle, refine the notion of traits by decomposing species into populations and differentiating traits within species). Under these simplifying assumptions[35], we reveal the universal drivers of the robustness distribution of any ecosystem service to species loss
An ecosystem service E consists of N required functional traits shared between S species, with p characterising the connectance of the species-to-traits network (Fig. 2)
Summary
Ensuring reliable supply of services from nature is key to the sustainable development and well-being of human societies. We use a qualitative Boolean modelling framework to identify universal drivers of the robustness of ecosystem service supply to species loss. These drivers comprise simple features of the networks that link species to the functions they perform that, in turn, underpin a service. Through current global environmental change, humans are driving species to extinction at rates hundreds to thousands of times in excess of background[4,5,6] Such extinctions compromise the capacity of ecosystems to reliably provide the goods and services upon which human societies depend[7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. The ecosystem service equates to the logical OR function, where full redundancy among species promotes robust service supply even in the face of multiple species extinctions[25,29,30]
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