Jürgen Kreyling, Nico Eisenhauer, Anja Vogel, David Tilman, Madhav P Thakur, Eric Seabloom, Alrun Siebenkäs, Bernhard Schmid, Peter B Reich, H Wayne Polley, Cecilia Palmborg, Shahid Naeem, Akira S Mori, Sebastian T Meyer, Michel Loreau, Vojtech Lanta, Dylan Craven, Anke Jentsch, Andy Hector, Yann Hautier, John N Griffin, Enrica de Luca, Carl Beierkuhnlein, Brian Wilsey, Alexandra Weigelt, Jasper van Ruijven, Christiane Roscher, Anne Ebeling, Helge Bruelheide, John Connolly, Pete Manning, Forest Isbell
Journal: Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences 2017;371(1694):20150277
PMID: 27114579
Global change drivers are rapidly altering resource availability and biodiversity. While there is consensus that greater biodiversity increases the functioning of ecosystems, the extent to which biodiversity buffers ecosystem productivity in response to changes in resource availability remains unclear. We use data from 16 grassland experiments across North America and Europe that manipulated plant species richness and one of two essential resources-soil nutrients or water-to assess the direction and strength of the interaction between plant diversity and resource alteration on above-ground productivity and net biodiversity, complementarity, and selection effects. Despite strong increases in productivity with nutrient addition and decreases in productivity with drought, we found that resource alterations did not alter biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships. Our results suggest that these relationships are largely determined by increases in complementarity effects along plant species richness gradients. Although nutrient addition reduced complementarity effects at high diversity, this appears to be due to high biomass in monocultures under nutrient enrichment. Our results indicate that diversity and the complementarity of species are important regulators of grassland ecosystem productivity, regardless of changes in other drivers of ecosystem function.
© 2016 The Authors.
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