Higher biodiversity is required to sustain multiple ecosystem processes across temperature regimes
Abstract
Biodiversity loss is occurring rapidly worldwide, yet it is uncertain whether few or many species are required to sustain ecosystem functioning in the face of environmental change. The importance of biodiversity might be enhanced when multiple ecosystem processes (termed multifunctionality) and environmental contexts are considered, yet no studies have quantified this explicitly to date. We measured five key processes and their combined multifunctionality at three temperatures (5, 10 and 15 °C) in freshwater aquaria containing different animal assemblages (1-4 benthic macroinvertebrate species). For single processes, biodiversity effects were weak and were best predicted by additive-based models, i.e. polyculture performances represented the sum of their monoculture parts. There were, however, significant effects of biodiversity on multifunctionality at the low and the high (but not the intermediate) temperature. Variation in the contribution of species to processes across temperatures meant that greater biodiversity was required to sustain multifunctionality across different temperatures than was the case for single processes. This suggests that previous studies might have underestimated the importance of biodiversity in sustaining ecosystem functioning in a changing environment.
Citation
Perkins , D M , Bailey , R A , Dossena , M , Gamfeldt , L , Reiss , J , Trimmer , M & Woodward , G 2015 , ' Higher biodiversity is required to sustain multiple ecosystem processes across temperature regimes ' , Global Change Biology , vol. 21 , no. 1 , pp. 396-406 . https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.12688
Publication
Global Change Biology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1354-1013Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2014 The Authors, Global Change Biology, Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
The authors thank the Natural Environment Research Council for financial support awarded to G. W. (Grant reference: NE/D013305/1) that funded D. M. P.'s research. Accepted 11 July 2014.Collections
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