Towards an assessment of multiple ecosystem processes and services via functional traits

By Francesco de Bello, S. Lavorel, Sandra Díaz, R. Harrington, J. H. C. Cornelissen, R. Bardgett, M. Berg, P. Cipriotti, C. Feld, D. Hering and 7 more. Biodiversity and Conservation, 2010

985 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Managing ecosystems to ensure the provision of multiple ecosystem services is a key challenge for applied ecology. Functional traits are receiving increasing attention as the main ecological attributes by which different organisms and biological communities influence ecosystem services through their effects on underlying ecosystem processes. Here we synthesize concepts and empirical evidence on linkages between functional traits and ecosystem services across different trophic levels. Most of the 247 studies reviewed considered plants and soil invertebrates, but quantitative trait–service associations have been documented for a range of organisms and ecosystems, illustrating the wide applicability of the trait approach. Within each trophic level, specific processes are affected by a combination of traits while particular key traits are simultaneously involved in the control of multiple processes. These multiple associations between traits and ecosystem processes can help to identify predictable trait–service clusters that depend on several trophic levels, such as clusters of traits of plants and soil organisms that underlie nutrient cycling, herbivory, and fodder and fibre production. We propose that the assessment of trait–service clusters will represent a crucial step in ecosystem service monitoring and in balancing the delivery of multiple, and sometimes conflicting, services in ecosystem management.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc0d08125529c57fef308b8b6fd3ec8599a58948

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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Citations in the corpus

Soil biodiversity, biological indicators and soil ecosystem services—an overview of European approaches (2012, background): “Those include a better mechanistic understanding of the relationships and possible generalizations across eco-regions, independent of taxonomy [28 ,50,51].”
Decoupling phylogenetic and functional diversity to reveal hidden signals in community assembly (2017, background): “This multidimensionality has effects on species coexistence (Kraft, Godoy & Levine 2015) and ecosystem functions (de Bello et al. 2010).”
Understanding biodiversity-ecosystem service relationships in urban areas: A comprehensive literature review (2017, positive): “This has led to the development of trait-based approaches to identify biotic control over ecosystem service delivery within (de Bello et al. 2010; Díaz et al. 2007; Lavorel 2013) and across trophic levels (Lavorel 2013; Moretti et al. 2013), as well as synergies and trade-offs among ecosystem…”
Plant functional effects on ecosystem services (2013, background): “Plant traits interact with those of other trophic levels in determining ecosystem services Many ecosystem services rely on interactions between plants and other trophic levels (De Bello et al. 2010; Cardinale et al. 2012).”
An attribute‐diversity approach to functional diversity, functional beta diversity, and related (dis)similarity measures (2019, background): “When all distances are between 0 and 1, Ricotta and Szeidl (2009) and de Bello et al. (2010) proposed transforming Q to the following species-equivalent formula: Article e01343; page 10 ANNE CHAO ET AL.”
sPlot – A new tool for global vegetation analyses (2019, positive): “This will allow linking vegetation plot information to ecosystem processes and services such as pest control, pollination and nutrient cycling (e.g., de Bello et al., 2010).”