Using Phylogenetic, Functional and Trait Diversity to Understand Patterns of Plant Community Productivity

By Marc W. Cadotte, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, David Tilman, Todd H. Oakley. PLoS ONE, 2009

686 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Two decades of research showing that increasing plant diversity results in greater community productivity has been predicated on greater functional diversity allowing access to more of the total available resources. Thus, understanding phenotypic attributes that allow species to partition resources is fundamentally important to explaining diversity-productivity relationships. Methodology/Principal Findings Here we use data from a long-term experiment (Cedar Creek, MN) and compare the extent to which productivity is explained by seven types of community metrics of functional variation: 1) species richness, 2) variation in 10 individual traits, 3) functional group richness, 4) a distance-based measure of functional diversity, 5) a hierarchical multivariate clustering method, 6) a nonmetric multidimensional scaling approach, and 7) a phylogenetic diversity measure, summing phylogenetic branch lengths connecting community members together and may be a surrogate for ecological differences. Although most of these diversity measures provided significant explanations of variation in productivity, the presence of a nitrogen fixer and phylogenetic diversity were the two best explanatory variables. Further, a statistical model that included the presence of a nitrogen fixer, seed weight and phylogenetic diversity was a better explanation of community productivity than other models. Conclusions Evolutionary relationships among species appear to explain patterns of grassland productivity. Further, these results reveal that functional differences among species involve a complex suite of traits and that perhaps phylogenetic relationships provide a better measure of the diversity among species that contributes to productivity than individual or small groups of traits.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a3f6edda751372f969740fb86a55cd4e9db3eb9

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Citations in the corpus

Functional diversity measures: an overview of their redundancy and their ability to discriminate community assembly rules (2010, methodology): “To test the effect of a set of biodiversity facets on ecosystem functioning ecologists usually rely on regression methods (e.g. Cadotte et al. 2009).”
Beyond species: functional diversity and the maintenance of ecological processes and services (2011, background): “relates to ecosystem function (Petchey, Hector &Gaston 2004; Cadotte et al. 2009; Flynn et al. 2011) and how diversity responds to environmental stress or disturbance (Norberg”
Forest productivity increases with evenness, species richness and trait variation: a global meta‐analysis (2012, background): “at explaining productivity in grassland experiments (Cadotte et al. 2009; Marquard et al. 2009).”
Climate, soil and plant functional types as drivers of global fine‐root trait variation (2017, background): “Fine roots perform essential functions for plants including nutrient and water acquisition (Waisel, Eshel & Kafkafi 2002) and influence a broad spectrum of ecological processes, from net primary production (Cadotte et al. 2009) to nutrient cycling (Freschet et al.”
A trait-based experimental approach to understand the mechanisms underlying biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships (2014, positive): “…for existing plant communities in biodiversity experiments (Petchey, Hector, & Gaston, 2004; Scherer-Lorenzen, 2008; Viketoft, Bengtsson, 290 Sohlenius, Berg, Petchey, et al., 2009; Wacker et al., 2009; Cadotte et al., 2009; Flynn, Mirotchnick, Jain, Palmer, & Naeem, 2011; Roscher et al., 2012).”
Improving intercropping: a synthesis of research in agronomy, plant physiology and ecology. (2015, background): “Doubling phylogenetic diversity of experimental grassland communities resulted in a biomass increase of c. 20%, and was the most influential factor for productivity after the presence of N-fixers, and before factors such as species richness and functional diversity (Cadotte et al., 2009).”
The distribution of below‐ground traits is explained by intrinsic species differences and intraspecific plasticity in response to root neighbours (2013, background): “For example, our study suggests that more detailed descriptions of below-ground species interactions could improve the understanding of diversity effects on below-ground productivity (Cadotte et al. 2009; Mommer 2010).”
Unifying Species Diversity, Phylogenetic Diversity, Functional Diversity, and Related Similarity and Differentiation Measures Through Hill Numbers (2014, background): “Functional diversity is regarded as key to understanding ecosystem processes and their response to environmental stress or disturbance (Norberg et al. 2001, Suding et al. 2008, Cadotte et al. 2009, Flynn et al. 2011).”
Species richness, but not phylogenetic diversity, influences community biomass production and temporal stability in a re-examination of 16 grassland biodiversity studies (2015, background): “…instances where phylogenetic diversity was positively 129 related to ecosystem functioning, it tended to explain only a small fraction more of the 130 variation than species richness (Cadotte et al. 2008, Cadotte et al. 2009, Cadotte 2013, but 131 see Paquette & Messier 2011, Cadotte et al. 2012).”
Thirty years of progeny from Chao’s inequality: Estimating and comparing richness with incidence data and incomplete sampling (2017, methodology): “A rapidly growing literature discusses phylogenetic diversity, which incorporates evolutionary histories among species into diversity analysis (see Faith, 1992; Warwick and Clarke, 1995; Crozier, 1997; Webb and Nonoghue, 2005; Petchey and Gaston, 2002; Cadotte et al., 2009; Cavender-Bares, Ackerly a”
Spatial mismatch and congruence between taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity: the need for integrative conservation strategies in a changing world. (2010, background): “Finally, as between-species interactions and species functional roles involve complex and often unknown suite of traits, PD was proposed as a holistic characteristic of species assemblages that can even better explain ecosystem productivity than FD (Cadotte et al. 2009).”
Contrasting changes in taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity during a long‐term succession: insights into assembly processes (2013, background): “Second, phylogenetic diversity may represent a more inclusive overall measure of ecological similarity than measures of functional diversity, which are based on a limited set of traits (Cadotte et al. 2009; Meynard et al. 2011).”
Linking root traits and competitive success in grassland species (2016, neutral): “Selective root placement”
Shocks to the system: community assembly of the oak savanna in a 40-year fire frequency experiment (2012, methodology): “Diversity of functional traits was calculated using PSV based on hierarchical clustering of univariate or multivariate traits (Petchey and Gaston 2002) as implemented by Cadotte et al. (2009).”