Department of Marine Sciences, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3300, USA Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies and Department of Biology, San Francisco State University, Tiburon, CA 94920, USA School of Marine Sciences, The College of William and Mary, Gloucester Point, VA 23062-1346, USA.
Ecol Lett. 2005 Nov;8(11):1165-74. doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2005.00823.x.
Plant biodiversity can enhance primary production in terrestrial ecosystems, but biodiversity effects are largely unstudied in the ocean. We conducted a series of field and mesocosm experiments to measure the relative effects of macroalgal identity and richness on primary productivity (net photosynthetic rate) and biomass accumulation in hard substratum subtidal communities in North Carolina, USA. Algal identity consistently and strongly affected production; species richness effects, although often significent, were subtle. Partitioning of the net biodiversity effect indicated that complementarity effects were always positive and species were usually more productive in mixtures than in monoculture. Surprisingly, slow growing species performed relatively better in the most diverse treatments than the most productive species, thus selection effects were consistently negative. Our results suggest that several basic mechanisms underlying terrestrial plant biodiversity effects also operate in algal-based marine ecosystems, and thus may be general.
植物生物多样性可以提高陆地生态系统的初级生产力，但海洋中的生物多样性效应在很大程度上尚未得到研究。我们在美国北卡罗来纳州的潮下带硬底生境中进行了一系列野外和中观实验，以测量大型藻类身份和丰富度对初级生产力（净光合速率）和生物量积累的相对影响。藻类身份始终强烈地影响着生产力；尽管物种丰富度效应通常很显著，但却很细微。净生物多样性效应的划分表明，互补效应始终为正，并且在混合物中，物种通常比在单养中更具生产力。令人惊讶的是，生长缓慢的物种在最多样化的处理中比最具生产力的物种表现相对更好，因此选择效应始终为负。我们的结果表明，陆地植物生物多样性效应的几个基本机制也在基于藻类的海洋生态系统中起作用，因此可能具有普遍性。
