German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.
Institute of Biology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany.
Nat Ecol Evol. 2018 Oct;2(10):1579-1587. doi: 10.1038/s41559-018-0647-7. Epub 2018 Aug 27.
A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated that biodiversity stabilizes ecosystem functioning over time in grassland ecosystems. However, the relative importance of different facets of biodiversity underlying the diversity-stability relationship remains unclear. Here we use data from 39 grassland biodiversity experiments and structural equation modelling to investigate the roles of species richness, phylogenetic diversity and both the diversity and community-weighted mean of functional traits representing the 'fast-slow' leaf economics spectrum in driving the diversity-stability relationship. We found that high species richness and phylogenetic diversity stabilize biomass production via enhanced asynchrony in the performance of co-occurring species. Contrary to expectations, low phylogenetic diversity enhances ecosystem stability directly, albeit weakly. While the diversity of fast-slow functional traits has a weak effect on ecosystem stability, communities dominated by slow species enhance ecosystem stability by increasing mean biomass production relative to the standard deviation of biomass over time. Our in-depth, integrative assessment of factors influencing the diversity-stability relationship demonstrates a more multicausal relationship than has been previously acknowledged.
大量证据表明，生物多样性可使草原生态系统的生态功能随时间稳定下来。然而，多样性-稳定性关系背后不同生物多样性层面的相对重要性尚不清楚。在这里，我们使用了 39 个草原生物多样性实验的数据和结构方程模型，研究了物种丰富度、系统发育多样性以及代表“快-慢”叶片经济谱的功能性状多样性和群落加权均值在驱动多样性-稳定性关系中的作用。我们发现，高物种丰富度和系统发育多样性通过增强共存物种表现的非同步性来稳定生物量的产生。与预期相反，低系统发育多样性直接增强了生态系统的稳定性，尽管作用较弱。虽然“快-慢”功能性状的多样性对生态系统稳定性的影响较弱，但相对于生物量的标准差，由慢物种主导的群落通过增加生物量的平均值来增强生态系统的稳定性。我们对影响多样性-稳定性关系的因素进行了深入的综合评估，结果表明，这种关系比以前所认识的更为多因。
