Biodiversity promotes ecosystem functioning despite environmental change.

Nico Eisenhauer, Pubin Hong, Bernhard Schmid, Frederik De Laender, Xingwen Zhang, Haozhen Chen, Dylan Craven, Hans J De Boeck, Yann Hautier, Owen L Petchey, Peter B Reich, Bastian Steudel, Maren Striebel, Madhav P Thakur, Shaopeng Wang

Journal: Ecology letters 2022;25(2):555-569

PMID: 34854529

Abstract

Three decades of research have demonstrated that biodiversity can promote the functioning of ecosystems. Yet, it is unclear whether the positive effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning will persist under various types of global environmental change drivers. We conducted a meta-analysis of 46 factorial experiments manipulating both species richness and the environment to test how global change drivers (i.e. warming, drought, nutrient addition or CO enrichment) modulated the effect of biodiversity on multiple ecosystem functions across three taxonomic groups (microbes, phytoplankton and plants). We found that biodiversity increased ecosystem functioning in both ambient and manipulated environments, but often not to the same degree. In particular, biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning were larger in stressful environments induced by global change drivers, indicating that high-diversity communities were more resistant to environmental change. Using a subset of studies, we also found that the positive effects of biodiversity were mainly driven by interspecific complementarity and that these effects increased over time in both ambient and manipulated environments. Our findings support biodiversity conservation as a key strategy for sustainable ecosystem management in the face of global environmental change.

© 2021 The Authors. Ecology Letters published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Address: Institute of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing, China.; Remote Sensing Laboratories, Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.; Research Unit of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, Namur Institute of Complex Systems, and Institute of Life, Earth, and the Environment, University of Namur, Namur, Belgium.; German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.; Institute of Biology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany.; School of Mathematics and Statistics, Yunnan University, China.; Centro de Modelación y Monitoreo de Ecosistemas, Universidad Mayor, Santiago de Chile, Chile.; Plants and Ecosystems (PLECO), Department of Biology, University of Antwerp, Wilrijk, Belgium.; Ecology and Biodiversity Group, Department of Biology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, CH, The Netherlands.; Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.; Department of Forest Resources, University of Minnesota, St Paul, Minnesota, USA.; Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University, Penrith, New South Wales, Australia.; Institute for Global Change Biology, and School for the Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.; Department of Health and Environmental Sciences, Xi'an Jiaotong- Liverpool University, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China.; Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, Carl Von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Wilhelmshaven, Germany.; Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
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