Université du Québec à Rimouski, Département de Biologie, Chimie et Géographie, 300 Allée des Ursulines, Québec G5L 3A1, Canada.
Nature. 2011 Jan 6;469(7328):89-92. doi: 10.1038/nature09592.
The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) has become a cornerstone of community and ecosystem ecology and an essential criterion for making decisions in conservation biology and policy planning. It has recently been proposed that evolutionary history should influence the BEF relationship because it determines species traits and, thus, species’ ability to exploit resources. Here we test this hypothesis by combining experimental evolution with a BEF experiment. We isolated 20 bacterial strains from a marine environment and evolved each to be generalists or specialists. We then tested the effect of evolutionary history on the strength of the BEF relationship with assemblages of 1 to 20 species constructed from the specialists, generalists and ancestors. Assemblages of generalists were more productive on average because of their superior ability to exploit the environmental heterogeneity. The slope of the BEF relationship was, however, stronger for the specialist assemblages because of enhanced niche complementarity. These results show how the BEF relationship depends critically on the legacy of past evolutionary events.
生物多样性与生态系统功能（BEF）之间的关系已成为群落和生态系统生态学的基石，也是保护生物学和政策规划决策的重要标准。最近有人提出，进化历史应该会影响 BEF 关系，因为进化历史决定了物种的特征，从而决定了物种利用资源的能力。在这里，我们通过将实验进化与 BEF 实验相结合来检验这一假设。我们从海洋环境中分离出 20 株细菌，并将每种细菌进化为广食性或专食性。然后，我们用由专家、广食者和祖先组成的 1 到 20 个物种的组合来测试进化历史对 BEF 关系强度的影响。由于广食者具有优越的利用环境异质性的能力，因此它们的平均生产力更高。然而，由于生态位互补性增强，专食者组合的 BEF 关系斜率更强。这些结果表明，BEF 关系如何取决于过去进化事件的遗留影响。
