Land use intensification alters ecosystem multifunctionality via loss of biodiversity and changes to functional composition

By E. Allan, P. Manning, F. Alt, Julia Binkenstein, S. Blaser, N. Blüthgen, S. Böhm, F. Grassein, Norbert Hölzel, Valentin H. Klaus and 23 more. Ecology Letters, 2015

764 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Global change, especially land‐use intensification, affects human well‐being by impacting the delivery of multiple ecosystem services (multifunctionality). However, whether biodiversity loss is a major component of global change effects on multifunctionality in real‐world ecosystems, as in experimental ones, remains unclear. Therefore, we assessed biodiversity, functional composition and 14 ecosystem services on 150 agricultural grasslands differing in land‐use intensity. We also introduce five multifunctionality measures in which ecosystem services were weighted according to realistic land‐use objectives. We found that indirect land‐use effects, i.e. those mediated by biodiversity loss and by changes to functional composition, were as strong as direct effects on average. Their strength varied with land‐use objectives and regional context. Biodiversity loss explained indirect effects in a region of intermediate productivity and was most damaging when land‐use objectives favoured supporting and cultural services. In contrast, functional composition shifts, towards fast‐growing plant species, strongly increased provisioning services in more inherently unproductive grasslands.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/358515fc073c960967a5216d223bbbb541d464ef

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Citations in the corpus

An Underground Revolution: Biodiversity and Soil Ecological Engineering for Agricultural Sustainability. (2016, background): “Different ecosystem functions trade off against each other [98] and feedback on soil organisms.”
Species asynchrony and response diversity determine multifunctional stability of natural grasslands (2019, background): “However, note that the subset of ecosystem functions that need to be maximized differs among stakeholders (Allan et al., 2015).”
Biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning in a 15-year grassland experiment: Patterns, mechanisms, and open questions (2017, background): “the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem multifunctionality (e.g. Hector & Bagchi 2007; Allan et al. 2015; Lefcheck et al. 2015).”
Direct and indirect effects of invasive species: Biodiversity loss is a major mechanism by which an invasive tree affects ecosystem functioning (2019, background): “…that biodiversity loss affects ecosystem functioning in real-world ecosystems (e.g. Delgado-Baquerizo et al., 2015; Soliveres et al., 2016), and that diversity loss is a major component of global change effects (Allan et al., 2015), by extending them to different contexts and global change drivers.”
Identifying the tree species compositions that maximize ecosystem functioning in European forests (2018, background): “…analyses of our data showed few trade-offs between a range of multifunctionality measures reflecting alternative stakeholder objectives ( sensu Allan et al. 2015; van der Plas et al. 2018), changing our multifunctionality measure to represent specific management scenario’s is also unlikely to…”
A global meta-analyses of the response of multi-taxa diversity to grazing intensity in grasslands (2019, background): “The contradictory responses of biodiversity to grazing in different studies and areas may be associated with differences in grazing intensity and regime, or in environmental conditions (Bakker et al 2006, Allan and Crawley 2011, Yan et al 2015). Grazing intensitymay be themajor driving factor affect”
Weed-Species Abundance and Diversity Indices in Relation to Tillage Systems and Fertilization (2018, background): “Fertilization affects soil fertility and nutrient uptake, thus resulting inincreasing agricultural yields, as well as in modifications of weed communities (Allan et al., 2015).”
Deciphering the associations between soil microbial diversity and ecosystem multifunctionality driven by long‐term fertilization management (2018, background): “…(EMF) indices have been frequently applied to the study of soil ecosystems to provide a quantitative measure of soil biodiversity (Allan et al., 2015; Jing et al., 2015; Mori et al., 2016) may offer a useful tool to summarize these highly complex and interactive processes…”