Biodiversity at multiple trophic levels is needed for ecosystem multifunctionality

By S. Soliveres, Fons van der Plas, P. Manning, D. Prati, M. Gossner, S. Renner, F. Alt, H. Arndt, Vanessa Baumgartner, Julia Binkenstein and 48 more. Nature, 2016

781 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many experiments have shown that loss of biodiversity reduces the capacity of ecosystems to provide the multiple services on which humans depend. However, experiments necessarily simplify the complexity of natural ecosystems and will normally control for other important drivers of ecosystem functioning, such as the environment or land use. In addition, existing studies typically focus on the diversity of single trophic groups, neglecting the fact that biodiversity loss occurs across many taxa and that the functional effects of any trophic group may depend on the abundance and diversity of others. Here we report analysis of the relationships between the species richness and abundance of nine trophic groups, including 4,600 above- and below-ground taxa, and 14 ecosystem services and functions and with their simultaneous provision (or multifunctionality) in 150 grasslands. We show that high species richness in multiple trophic groups (multitrophic richness) had stronger positive effects on ecosystem services than richness in any individual trophic group; this includes plant species richness, the most widely used measure of biodiversity. On average, three trophic groups influenced each ecosystem service, with each trophic group influencing at least one service. Multitrophic richness was particularly beneficial for ‘regulating’ and ‘cultural’ services, and for multifunctionality, whereas a change in the total abundance of species or biomass in multiple trophic groups (the multitrophic abundance) positively affected supporting services. Multitrophic richness and abundance drove ecosystem functioning as strongly as abiotic conditions and land-use intensity, extending previous experimental results to real-world ecosystems. Primary producers, herbivorous insects and microbial decomposers seem to be particularly important drivers of ecosystem functioning, as shown by the strong and frequent positive associations of their richness or abundance with multiple ecosystem services. Our results show that multitrophic richness and abundance support ecosystem functioning, and demonstrate that a focus on single groups has led to researchers to greatly underestimate the functional importance of biodiversity.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61bf7acbc254e4088f3d84a2c5207cd387044b40

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Citations in the corpus

Facilitation and biodiversity–ecosystem function relationships in crop production systems and their role in sustainable farming (2021, background): “Many studies have been conducted to investigate such relationships (see e.g. Soliveres et al., 2016; Tilman et al., 2012), and review papers, building on this large body of work, have looked for general principles.”
Marine DNA viral macro- and micro-diversity from pole to pole (2019, background): “However, emerging studies across diverse environments show that the stability and diversity of higher trophic level organisms rely upon diversity throughout the food web (Soliveres et al., 2016).”
Microbiome definition re-visited: old concepts and new challenges (2020, background): “Most natural ecosystems are characterized by a high degree of spatial structuring, which has been considered to be important for many ecosystem services [96].”
Tree diversity is key for promoting the diversity and abundance of forest‐associated taxa in Europe (2020, background): “It is also crucial to predict cascading extinctions and the impact of multiple taxa on ecosystem functioning and ecosystem services (Cardinale et al. 2006, Soliveres et al. 2016).”
Above‐ and below‐ground biodiversity jointly regulate temperate forest multifunctionality along a local‐scale environmental gradient (2020, background): “…group (Delgado-Baquerizo et al., 2016; FelipeLucia et al., 2018), neglecting the fact that ecosystem functioning depends strongly on complex interactions between trophic levels and between above- and below-ground biodiversity (Baeten et al., 2018; Schuldt et al., 2018; Soliveres et al., 2016).”
Species asynchrony and response diversity determine multifunctional stability of natural grasslands (2019, background): “…affecting ecosystem functioning is well documented for those related to ecosystem productivity and carbon dynamics (Mokany et al., 2008; Smith & Knapp 2003), unlike other ecosystem functioning such as decomposition, pest control and pollinator abundance (Allan et al., 2015; Soliveres et al., 2016).”
Synthesizing the effects of large, wild herbivore exclusion on ecosystem function (2019, background): “What is more, productivity covariates like climate, land-use, and nutrient availability often significantly moderate these effects (Duffy, Godwin, & Cardinale, 2017; Lefcheck et al., 2015; Soliveres et al., 2016).”
Cascading extinctions as a hidden driver of insect decline (2020, background): “This overall negative trend for many insect populations has severe consequences for ecosystem stability and function (Soliveres et al., 2016; Fanin et al., 2018).”
Deciphering the associations between soil microbial diversity and ecosystem multifunctionality driven by long‐term fertilization management (2018, background): “Soils represent a significant reservoir of biodiversity that underlies multiple ecosystem processes (Bardgett & van der Putten, 2014; Heemsbergen et al., 2004; Soliveres et al., 2016).”
Direct and indirect effects of invasive species: Biodiversity loss is a major mechanism by which an invasive tree affects ecosystem functioning (2019, methodology): “These results add to the evidence 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…”