Evenness mediates the global relationship between forest productivity and richness

Abstract

1. Biodiversity is an important component of natural ecosystems, with higher species richness often correlating with an increase in ecosystem productivity. Yet, this relationship varies substantially across environments, typically becoming less pronounced at high levels of species richness. However, species richness alone cannot reflect all important properties of a community, including community evenness, which may mediate the relationship between biodiversity and productivity. If the evenness of a community correlates negatively with richness across forests globally, then a

Long‐term effects of intercropping on multi‐trophic structure and bio‐thermodynamic health of mixed Eucalyptus‐native tree plantations

“…Thus, our results showed that the growth of both Eucalyptus and mixed native trees was promoted with an increased intercropping ratio of native trees. Considering the increased evenness of trees with the increased intercropping ratio of native trees (indicated by SWI and PI), our results also confirmed the important effect of evenness on productivity of forests with high species richness (Hordijk et al, 2023).…”

Comment on ‘In complexity we trust: learning from the socialist calculation debate for ecosystem management’

“…And because the effects of introductions cascade through interaction networks, it is often difficult to predict whether they will reinforce or undermine the integrity of a given ecosystem [11,18,19]. Thus, attempting to artificially increase complexity can have unintended consequences [13,20,21] and entail trade-offs with other desirable system features, like resilience, robustness, or productivity [16,[22][23][24].…”

Functional coexistence theory: a mechanistic framework linking biodiversity to ecosystem function

“…Nonetheless, the degree to which biodiversity promotes community-level functioning varies greatly between systems (O'Connor et al 2017). While most work has focused on biomass production in terrestrial plants, the positive diversity-function relationships observed there may not generalize across ecosystem types (O'Connor et al 2017) with different species pools, environmental conditions (Spaak, Baert, et al 2017), or community structures (Hordijk et al 2023). Indeed, in certain highly competitive systems, consistently negative diversity-function relationships may be the norm (Maynard et al 2017).…”