Investigating the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality: challenges and solutions

By Jarrett E. K. Byrnes, Lars Gamfeldt, F. Isbell, J. Lefcheck, J. Griffin, Andy Hector, B. Cardinale, David U Hooper, L. Dee, J. Emmett Duffy. 2013

806 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Extensive research shows that more species‐rich assemblages are generally more productive and efficient in resource use than comparable assemblages with fewer species. But the question of how diversity simultaneously affects the wide variety of ecological functions that ecosystems perform remains relatively understudied. It presents several analytical and empirical challenges that remain unresolved. In particular, researchers have developed several disparate metrics to quantify multifunctionality, each characterizing different aspects of the concept and each with pros and cons. We compare four approaches to characterizing multifunctionality and its dependence on biodiversity, quantifying (i) magnitudes of multiple individual functions separately, (ii) the extent to which different species promote different functions, (iii) the average level of a suite of functions and (iv) the number of functions that simultaneously exceeds a critical threshold. We illustrate each approach using data from the pan‐European BIODEPTH experiment and the R multifunc package developed for this purpose, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and implement several methodological improvements. We conclude that an extension of the fourth approach that systematically explores all possible threshold values provides the most comprehensive description of multifunctionality to date. We outline this method and recommend its use in future research.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e32babcaf111c8811200576282d235c304bed58

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Citations in the corpus

Rare microbial taxa as the major drivers of ecosystem multifunctionality in long-term fertilized soils (2020, methodology): “We calculated the multifunctionality by using three metrics including average, single-threshold, and multiple-threshold as each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses (Byrnes et al., 2014), and then evaluated the relationship be-”
Forest microclimates and climate change: Importance, drivers and future research agenda (2021, background): “Very few studies have effectively evaluated ecosystem multifunctionality, and translated this to services, let alone relate it to microclimates (e.g., of the type suggested by Byrnes et al. 2014).”
Above‐ and below‐ground biodiversity jointly regulate temperate forest multifunctionality along a local‐scale environmental gradient (2020, methodology): “Please see detailed measurement approaches in Supporting Information, Appendix B. Averaging and multiple threshold methods were used to calculate a FM index (Byrnes et al., 2014; Zirbel et al., 2019).”
An Underground Revolution: Biodiversity and Soil Ecological Engineering for Agricultural Sustainability. (2016, background): “Multifunctionality indices have been applied to soil studies to provide a quantitative measure of soil biodiversity effects on multiple ecosystem functions simultaneously [100].”
Plant diversity represents the prevalent determinant of soil fungal community structure across temperate grasslands in northern China (2017, methodology): “These distance tables were subsequently standardized in the range between 0 and 1 and were used as a means describing geographic distance between sites (Byrnes et al., 2014).”
Land use intensification alters ecosystem multifunctionality via loss of biodiversity and changes to functional composition (2015, background): “This is conceptually superior to averaging functions because it does not assume that they are substitutable (Byrnes et al. 2013).”
Soil aggregate size-dependent relationships between microbial functional diversity and multifunctionality (2021, methodology): “Second, the thresholds approach was also implemented to decode the correlation between GeoChip microbial functional gene diversity and multifunctionality using the “multifunc” package in R (Byrnes et al., 2014).”
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning (2014, background): “Byrnes et al. (2014) provide a useful review of multifunctionality studies.”
Species asynchrony and response diversity determine multifunctional stability of natural grasslands (2019, methodology): “This evidence suggests that species asynchrony is a strong driver to stabilize more functions at higher levels (Byrnes et al., 2014).”
Identifying the tree species compositions that maximize ecosystem functioning in European forests (2018, result): “An alternative single threshold approach (Byrnes et al., 2014) provided a very similar measure of multifunctionality, so we expect qualitatively similar results when using alternative measures (Fig.”