Predicting ecosystem functions from biodiversity and mutualistic networks: an extension of trait-based concepts to plant - animal interactions

By Matthias Schleuning, Jochen Fründ, Daniel García. 2015

308 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Research linking biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) has been mostly centred on the infl uence of species richness on ecosystem functions in small-scale experiments with single trophic levels. In natural ecosystems, many ecosystem functions are mediated by interactions between plants and animals, such as pollination and seed dispersal by animals, for which BEF relationships are little understood. Largely disconnected from BEF research, network ecology has examined the structural diversity of complex ecological networks of interacting species. Here, we provide an overview of the most important concepts in BEF and ecological network research and exemplify their applicability to natural ecosystems with examples from pollination and seed-dispersal studies. In a synthesis, we connect the structural approaches of network analysis with the trait-based approaches of BEF research and propose a conceptual trait-based model for understanding BEF relationships of plant – animal interactions in natural ecosystems. Th e model describes the sequential processes that determine the BEF relationship, i.e. the responses of species to environmental fi lters, the matching of species in ecological networks and the functionality of species in terms of their quantitative and qualitative contributions to plant demography and ecosystem functioning. We illustrate this conceptual integration with examples from mutualistic interactions and highlight its value for predicting the consequences of biodiversity loss for multispecies interactions and ecosystem functions. We foresee that a better integration between BEF and network research will improve our mechanistic understanding of how biodiversity relates to the functioning of natural ecosystems. Our conceptual model is a step towards this integration between structural and functional biodiversity research.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a4ef6f3a922400913cda36c45cb1748a76832695

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Citations in the corpus

Climate change in the Eastern Amazon: crop-pollinator and occurrence-restricted bees are potentially more affected (2020, background): “2014), on bee-plant interaction networks (Schleuning et al. 2015), and on provision of crop pollination services (Giannini et al.”
Morphological trait matching shapes plant–frugivore networks across the Andes (2018, background): “The generality of trait matching is the base for predicting unknown interactions from species’ functional traits in novel ecological communities (Kissling and Schleuning 2015), for instance as a result of species’ migrations and local extinctions in response to climate change.”
A global synthesis reveals biodiversity-mediated benefits for crop production (2019, background): “Depending on the relative importance of species complementarity, community abundance, and the role of dominant species, different relationships between species richness and ecosystem services can be expected (10).”
AVONET: morphological, ecological and geographical data for all birds. (2022, background): “…species in each category in ecology and evolutionary biology, including adaptive radiation (Claramunt, 2010), character displacement (Tobias et al., 2014), community assembly (Trisos et al., 2014) and the predictive properties of traits in relation to ecological networks (Schleuning et al., 2015).”
Identifying Causes of Patterns in Ecological Networks: Opportunities and Limitations (2017, methodology): “…2013, Poisot et al. 2015, Pilosof et al. 2017)] and analyses using additional information beyond interaction topology and frequency [e.g., traits, abundances, phylogenies, and selective pressures outside the observed network (Vázquez et al. 2009a, 2015; Elias et al. 2013; Schleuning et al. 2015)].”
Variation in seed dispersal effectiveness: the redundancy of consequences in diversified tropical frugivore assemblages (2016, unknown): “Recent work by Schleuning et al. (2015) establishes an explicit link to disperser effectiveness, through the consideration of quantitative and qualitative effects of seed dispersal within a functional framework.”