| 1. |
- Fanin, Nicolas, et al.
(författare)
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Consistent effects of biodiversity loss on multifunctionality across contrasting ecosystems
- 2018
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Ingår i: Nature ecology & evolution. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2397-334X. ; 2, s. 269-278
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Understanding how loss of biodiversity affects ecosystem functioning, and thus the delivery of ecosystem goods and services, has become increasingly necessary in a changing world. Considerable recent attention has focused on predicting how biodiversity loss simultaneously impacts multiple ecosystem functions (that is, ecosystem multifunctionality), but the ways in which these effects vary across ecosystems remain unclear. Here, we report the results of two 19-year plant diversity manipulation experiments, each established across a strong environmental gradient. Although the effects of plant and associated fungal diversity loss on individual functions frequently differed among ecosystems, the consequences of biodiversity loss for multifunctionality were relatively invariant. However, the context-dependency of biodiversity effects also worked in opposing directions for different individual functions, meaning that similar multifunctionality values across contrasting ecosystems could potentially mask important differences in the effects of biodiversity on functioning among ecosystems. Our findings highlight that an understanding of the relative contribution of species or functional groups to individual ecosystem functions among contrasting ecosystems and their interactions (that is, complementarity versus competition) is critical for guiding management efforts aimed at maintaining ecosystem multifunctionality and the delivery of multiple ecosystem services.
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| 2. |
- Kardol, Paul, et al.
(författare)
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Long-term effects of species loss on community properties across contrasting ecosystems
- 2018
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Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 557, s. 710-713
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Biodiversity loss can heavily affect the functioning of ecosystems, and improving our understanding of how ecosystems respond to biodiversity decline is one of the main challenges in ecology(1-4). Several important aspects of the longer-term effects of biodiversity loss on ecosystems remain unresolved, including how these effects depend on environmental context(5-7). Here we analyse data from an across-ecosystem biodiversity manipulation experiment that, to our knowledge, represents the world's longest-running experiment of this type. This experiment has been set up on 30 lake islands in Sweden that vary considerably in productivity and soil fertility owing to differences in fire history(8,9). We tested the effects of environmental context on how plant species loss affected two fundamental community attributes-plant community biomass and temporal variability-over 20 years. In contrast to findings from artificially assembled communities(10-12), we found that the effects of species loss on community biomass decreased over time; this decrease was strongest on the least productive and least fertile islands. Species loss generally also increased temporal variability, and these effects were greatest on the most productive and most fertile islands. Our findings highlight that the ecosystem-level consequences of biodiversity loss are not constant across ecosystems and that understanding and forecasting these consequences necessitates taking into account the overarching role of environmental context.
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