High plant diversity is needed to maintain ecosystem services

Abstract

Biodiversity is rapidly declining worldwide, and there is consensus that this can decrease ecosystem functioning and services. It remains unclear, though, whether few or many of the species in an ecosystem are needed to sustain the provisioning of ecosystem services. It has been hypothesized that most species would promote ecosystem services if many times, places, functions and environmental changes were considered; however, no previous study has considered all of these factors together. Here we show that 84% of the 147 grassland plant species studied in 17 biodiversity experiments promoted ecosystem functioning at least once. Different species promoted ecosystem functioning during different years, at different places, for different functions and under different environmental change scenarios. Furthermore, the species needed to provide one function during multiple years were not the same as those needed to provide multiple functions within one year. Our results indicate that even more species will be needed to maintain ecosystem functioning and services than previously suggested by studies that have either (1) considered only the number of species needed to promote one function under one set of environmental conditions, or (2) separately considered the importance of biodiversity for providing ecosystem functioning across multiple years, places, functions or environmental change scenarios. Therefore, although species may appear functionally redundant when one function is considered under one set of environmental conditions, many species are needed to maintain multiple functions at multiple times and places in a changing world.

Trait‐based approaches to analyze links between the drivers of change and ecosystem services: Synthesizing existing evidence and future challenges

“…The loss of biodiversity may alter ecosystem functioning and the delivery of ecosystem services, with major repercussions on human well‐being (Balvanera et al., 2006; Dirzo et al., 2014; Hanski et al., 2012; Mace, Norris, & Fitter, 2012). Although biodiversity is assumed to be critical for providing ecosystem services (Cardinale et al., 2012; De Bello et al., 2010; Harrison et al., 2014), our understanding about the links between biodiversity and individual ecosystem services remains incomplete (Balvanera et al., 2014; Bennett et al., 2015; Isbell et al., 2011; Suding et al., 2008). Lavorel et al.…”

Facilitation between woody and herbaceous plants that associate with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in temperate European forests

“…Finally, herbaceous plants comprise approximately 80% of plant species diversity in forests and become extinct at considerably higher rates than woody plants (Gilliam, 2007). Given our increasing awareness that plant communities are rarely if ever functionally redundant (Isbell et al., 2011), it is important to understand herbaceous understory plant communities for effective conservation.…”

Integrating plant ecological responses to climate extremes from individual to ecosystem levels

“…The composition of interacting plant species within a community can greatly modify the response of both individual organisms and ecosystem productivity to a climate extreme [49,[95][96][97][98]. While it is clear that ecologically dominant species can often drive trajectories of ecosystem response and recovery, a large body of evidence supports biodiversity as an ecological property of plant communities that increases their functional stability [87][88][89]. The diversity-stability hypothesis is rooted in the multifunctional advantage of niche partitioning among species, in which functional diversity among species is an emergent property of variability in the environment [46,99].…”

“…Thus, differential mechanisms besides dominance may operate in communities where species abundances are more evenly distributed or species turnover is high. On this issue, the well-documented relationship of plant biodiversity with ecosystem functioning and stability [87][88][89] suggests that such dynamics are likely to operate in plant communities during and/or after periods of climatic stress. As a result, efforts that scale individual species responses to ecosystem responses to climate extremes will likely undermine the complexity of processes occurring at the community level.…”