Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
Doñana Biological Station-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Seville, Spain.
Science. 2018 Feb 16;359(6377):791-793. doi: 10.1126/science.aao2117.
Ecologists have shown through hundreds of experiments that ecological communities with more species produce higher levels of essential ecosystem functions such as biomass production, nutrient cycling, and pollination, but whether this finding holds in nature (that is, in large-scale and unmanipulated systems) is controversial. This knowledge gap is troubling because ecosystem services have been widely adopted as a justification for global biodiversity conservation. Here we show that, to provide crop pollination in natural systems, the number of bee species must increase by at least one order of magnitude compared with that in field experiments. This increase is driven by species turnover and its interaction with functional dominance, mechanisms that emerge only at large scales. Our results show that maintaining ecosystem services in nature requires many species, including relatively rare ones.
生态学家通过数百项实验表明，物种多样性更高的生态群落能够产生更高水平的基本生态系统功能，如生物量生产、养分循环和传粉等，但这一发现是否适用于自然环境（即在大规模和未经人为干预的系统中）存在争议。由于生态系统服务已被广泛用作全球生物多样性保护的理由，因此这一知识空白令人困扰。在这里，我们表明，为了在自然系统中提供作物传粉服务，与田间实验相比，蜜蜂物种的数量必须至少增加一个数量级。这种增加是由物种更替及其与功能优势的相互作用驱动的，而这些机制仅在大规模时才会出现。我们的研究结果表明，在自然环境中维持生态系统服务需要许多物种，包括相对较少的稀有物种。
