Incorporating plant functional diversity effects in ecosystem service assessments

Abstract

Global environmental change affects the sustained provision of a wide set of ecosystem services. Although the delivery of ecosystem services is strongly affected by abiotic drivers and direct land use effects, it is also modulated by the functional diversity of biological communities (the value, range, and relative abundance of functional traits in a given ecosystem). The focus of this article is on integrating the different possible mechanisms by which functional diversity affects ecosystem properties that are directly relevant to ecosystem services. We propose a systematic way for progressing in understanding how land cover change affects these ecosystem properties through functional diversity modifications. Models on links between ecosystem properties and the local mean, range, and distribution of plant trait values are numerous, but they have been scattered in the literature, with varying degrees of empirical support and varying functional diversity components analyzed. Here we articulate these different components in a single conceptual and methodological framework that allows testing them in combination. We illustrate our approach with examples from the literature and apply the proposed framework to a grassland system in the central French Alps in which functional diversity, by responding to land use change, alters the provision of ecosystem services important to local stakeholders. We claim that our framework contributes to opening a new area of research at the interface of land change science and fundamental ecology.biodiversity ͉ land change ͉ mass ratio hypothesis ͉ plant functional traits G lobal environmental changes, including land use and land cover changes, have considerable impacts on the ecological properties of ecosystems and therefore on the ecosystem services (ES) that societies derive from them (1). Although links between ecosystem properties (EP) and ES are not always trivial, many ES and their changes can be reasonably quantified by EP that are routinely measured in ecological studies (2). Global change effects on EP can be direct, through their effects on physical and chemical processes and on the metabolism and behavior of organisms. Global change drivers can also influence EP indirectly through their impacts on biodiversity, either through their effects on local biota or by altering the ability of organisms to disperse through landscapes. Relevant changes in biodiversity are manifested through changes in plant functional diversity (FD), i.e., the value, range, and relative abundance of plant functional traits in a given ecosystem (2). Although often subtler than direct effects of global change drivers (3, 4), these indirect biotic effects remain a major source of uncertainty in predicting the impacts of global change on ES provision.Conceptual models accounting for links between the functional trait values of local plant communities and EP are scattered in the literature, and the conceptual connections between them are not always clear. We articulate the most important of those models i...

Does functional homogenization accompany taxonomic homogenization of British birds and how do biotic factors and climate affect these processes?

“…Functional diversity is an important axis of biodiversity which dictates ecosystem functioning (Clark, Flynn, Butterfield & Reich, 2012; Díaz et al., 2007), community responses to environmental change (Ernst, Linsenmair & Rödel, 2006; Forrest, Thorp, Kremen & Williams, 2015; Meynard et al., 2011), and community stability and resilience (Mori, Furukawa & Sasaki, 2013). Using spatial (dis)similarity represents a recent approach to investigating functional homogenization and makes it more comparable with measures of taxonomic homogenization than previously used measures of mean community specialization.…”

Plant functional diversity enhances associations of soil fungal diversity with vegetation and soil in the restoration of semiarid sandy grassland

“…This is support for the mass ratio hypothesis (Grime 1998) and emphasizes effects of the most abundant species' traits on ecosystem function and properties (Díaz et al. 2007; Conti and Díaz 2013). Previous study has suggested that plant height is strongly linked to overall plant size as well as to competitive interactions for light (Aan et al.…”

Functional traits in agriculture: agrobiodiversity and ecosystem services

“…Using traits to generate agroecosystem management strategies Previous efforts to integrate functional trait research into ecosystem service assessments have been proposed, but these have stopped short of creating tangible management targets that can be practically implemented by managers [20,39,65]. Farmers do not manage for traits directly, but rather manage agroecosystems by manipulating the abundances and location of species or through physical and chemical manipulation of the agroecosystem (e.g., tillage or fertilization).…”

“…Understanding linkages between agrobiodiversity and ecosystem services is crucial for predicting how changes in environment and management practices will impact the multiple ecosystem services provided by agroecosystems [16][17][18]. Thus, we argue here that a trait-based approach to agriculture that is analogous to that applied in broader ecology (e.g., [4,6,[19][20][21]) could help better identify the mechanisms underlying the role of agrobiodiversity in providing agroecosystem services.…”