Species richness is more important for ecosystem functioning than species turnover along an elevational gradient

Albrecht, Jörg; Peters, Marcell K.; Becker, Joscha N.; Behler, Christina; Claßen, Alice; Enßlin, Andreas; Ferger, Stefan W.; Gebert, Friederike; Gerschlauer, Friederike; Helbig‐Bonitz, Maria; Kindeketa, William J.; Kühnel, Anna; Mayr, Antonia V.; Njovu, Henry K.; Pabst, Holger; Pommer, Ulf; Röder, Juliane; Rutten, Gemma; Costa, David Schellenberger; Sierra-Cornejo, Natalia; Vogeler, Anna; Vollstädt, Maximilian G. R.; Dulle, Hamadi I.; Eardley, Connal; Howell, Kim M.; Keller, Alexander; Peters, Ralph S.; Kakengi, Victor; Hemp, Claudia; Zhang, Jie; Manning, Peter; Mueller, Thomas; Bogner, Christina; Böhning‐Gaese, Katrin; Brandl, Roland; Hertel, Dietrich; Huwe, Bernd; Kiese, Ralf; Kleyer, Michael; Leuschner, Christoph; Kuzyakov, Yakov; Nauß, Thomas; Tschapka, Marco; Fischer, Markus; Hemp, Andreas; Steffan‐Dewenter, Ingolf; Schleuning, Matthias

doi:10.1038/s41559-021-01550-9

Cited by 49 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…Such relationships can also be observed on mountainsides. For example, species richness enhances a set of ecosystem functions related to the biomass stocks of microbes, plants or animals, and the processes rates such as pollination, brood parasitism or litter decomposition across 13 ecosystem types along a broad elevational gradient (850–4550 m) on Mount Kilimanjaro in Eastern Africa (Albrecht et al ., 2021). Considering species‐level effects on ecosystem functioning, the functional composition represented by the diversity of microbial traits (i.e.…”

Section: Key Questions and Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…community‐level aggregated gene orthologues) improves the explanatory power of nutrient‐induced responses of growth rates along the C. Hart Merriam elevation gradient in North America (Hu et al ., 2021b). However, the strength of diversity effects on ecosystem functioning is strongly context‐dependent, such as environmental heterogeneity (Peters et al ., 2019; Albrecht et al ., 2021; Hu et al ., 2021a), due to strong environmental gradients such as climate and ecosystem types on mountainsides. For instance, Albrecht et al .…”

Section: Key Questions and Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, Albrecht et al . (2021) show that environmental heterogeneity across ecosystem types shapes the effects of diversity on ecosystem functioning and contributes to the diversity effects by the increases from explaining 49% to 72% of the variation in ecosystem functions.…”

Section: Key Questions and Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…energetics, resources and stress). For example, temperature and primary productivity decline with elevation, which leads to increased plant litter decomposition and soil carbon loss due to not just a kinetic effect on microbial reaction rates but results from plant inputs stimulating microbial growth (Nottingham et al ., 2019; Peters et al ., 2019; Albrecht et al ., 2021). Unravelling diversity patterns of microorganisms in parallel with macroorganisms (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Embracing mountain microbiome and ecosystem functions under global change

Wang

Meng

et al. 2022

New Phytologist

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Mountains are pivotal to maintaining habitat heterogeneity, global biodiversity, ecosystem functions and services to humans. They have provided classic model natural systems for plant and animal diversity gradient studies for over 250 years. In the recent decade, the exploration of microorganisms on mountainsides has also achieved substantial progress. Here, we review the literature on microbial diversity across taxonomic groups and ecosystem types on global mountains. Microbial community shows climatic zonation with orderly successions along elevational gradients, which are largely consistent with traditional climatic hypotheses. However, elevational patterns are complicated for species richness without general rules in terrestrial and aquatic environments and are driven mainly by deterministic processes caused by abiotic and biotic factors. We see a major shift from documenting patterns of biodiversity towards identifying the mechanisms that shape microbial biogeographical patterns and how these patterns vary under global change by the inclusion of novel ecological theories, frameworks and approaches. We thus propose key questions and cutting-edge perspectives to advance future research in mountain microbial biogeography by focusing on biodiversity hypotheses, incorporating meta-ecosystem framework and novel key drivers, adapting recently developed approaches in trait-based ecology and manipulative field experiments, disentangling biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships and finally modelling and predicting their global change responses.

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Section: Key Questions and Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Key Questions and Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Key Questions and Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Embracing mountain microbiome and ecosystem functions under global change

Wang

Meng

et al. 2022

New Phytologist

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“…Our beta diversity estimates, on the other hand, show a rather uniform pattern across biomes, with the exception of montane grasslands and shrublands, which show the highest species turnover. The high beta diversity identified for the montane biome may be driven by the increased elevational gradients in this area, as species turnover has been found to be higher along elevational gradients ( Venn et al, 2017 ; Albrecht et al, 2021 ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Estimating Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Diversity Through Deep Learning

et al. 2022

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The reliable mapping of species richness is a crucial step for the identification of areas of high conservation priority, alongside other value and threat considerations. This is commonly done by overlapping range maps of individual species, which requires dense availability of occurrence data or relies on assumptions about the presence of species in unsampled areas deemed suitable by environmental niche models. Here, we present a deep learning approach that directly estimates species richness, skipping the step of estimating individual species ranges. We train a neural network model based on species lists from inventory plots, which provide ground truth data for supervised machine learning. The model learns to predict species richness based on spatially associated variables, including climatic and geographic predictors, as well as counts of available species records from online databases. We assess the empirical utility of our approach by producing independently verifiable maps of alpha, beta, and gamma plant diversity at high spatial resolutions for Australia, a continent with highly heterogeneous diversity patterns. Our deep learning framework provides a powerful and flexible new approach for estimating biodiversity patterns, constituting a step forward toward automated biodiversity assessments.

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Alpha and beta diversity jointly drive the aboveground biomass in temperate and tropical forests

Yao,

Huang,

Zang

2023

Ecology and Evolution

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Changes in biodiversity often affect ecosystem functioning. However, most previous biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) studies have generally been limited to very small spatial grains. Thus, knowledge regarding the biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships across spatial scales is lacking. Moreover, the multiscale nature of biodiversity, and specifically β diversity (i.e., spatial heterogeneity in species composition) was still largely missing in BEF studies. Here, using the vegetation and functional trait data collected from four 6‐ha forest dynamics plots (FDPs) in temperate and tropical forests in China, we examine the scale‐dependent relationships between tree diversity and the aboveground biomass (AGB), as well as the roles of species spatial heterogeneity in determining the AGB. In tropical forests, the effect of species richness on AGB decreased with spatial grains, while functional dominance played a stronger role at larger spatial grains. In temperate forests, positive relationship between diversity and AGB occurred at all spatial grains, especially on smaller scales. In both temperate and tropical forests, β diversity was positively correlated with AGB, but weaker than α diversity in determining AGB. Overall, complementarity and selection hypothesis play dominant role in determining AGB in temperate and tropical forests, respectively. The roles of these underlying mechanisms are more pronounced with increasing spatial scales. β diversity, a hitherto underexplored facet of biodiversity, is likely to increase ecosystem functions by species spatial turnover and should not be neglected in BEF explorations. Our findings have practical implications for forest management and demonstrate that biotic heterogeneity plays an important positive role in ecosystem functioning.

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Species richness is more important for ecosystem functioning than species turnover along an elevational gradient

Cited by 49 publications

References 79 publications

Embracing mountain microbiome and ecosystem functions under global change

Embracing mountain microbiome and ecosystem functions under global change

Estimating Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Diversity Through Deep Learning

Alpha and beta diversity jointly drive the aboveground biomass in temperate and tropical forests

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