Community Ecology, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), Birmensdorf, 8903, Switzerland.
Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Zurich, 8092, Switzerland.
Ecol Appl. 2021 Apr;31(3):e02271. doi: 10.1002/eap.2271. Epub 2021 Feb 23.
It is generally assumed that restoring biodiversity will enhance diversity and ecosystem functioning. However, to date, it has rarely been evaluated whether and how restoration efforts manage to rebuild biodiversity and multiple ecosystem functions (ecosystem multifunctionality) simultaneously. Here, we quantified how three restoration methods of increasing intervention intensity (harvest only < topsoil removal < topsoil removal + propagule addition) affected grassland ecosystem multifunctionality 22 yr after the restoration event. We compared restored with intensively managed and targeted seminatural grasslands based on 13 biotic and abiotic, above- and belowground properties. We found that all three restoration methods improved ecosystem multifunctionality compared to intensively managed grasslands and developed toward the targeted seminatural grasslands. However, whereas higher levels of intervention intensity reached ecosystem multifunctionality of targeted seminatural grasslands after 22 yr, lower intervention missed this target. Moreover, we found that topsoil removal with and without seed addition accelerated the recovery of biotic and aboveground properties, and we found no negative long-term effects on abiotic or belowground properties despite removing the top layer of the soil. We also evaluated which ecosystem properties were the best indicators for restoration success in terms of accuracy and cost efficiency. Overall, we demonstrated that low-cost measures explained relatively more variation of ecosystem multifunctionality compared to high-cost measures. Plant species richness was the most accurate individual property in describing ecosystem multifunctionality, as it accounted for 54% of ecosystem multifunctionality at only 4% of the costs of our comprehensive multifunctionality approach. Plant species richness is the property that typically is used in restoration monitoring by conservation agencies. Vegetation structure, soil carbon storage and water-holding capacity together explained 70% of ecosystem multifunctionality at only twice the costs (8%) of plant species richness, which is, in our opinion, worth considering in future restoration monitoring projects. Hence, our findings provide a guideline for land managers how they could obtain an accurate estimate of aboveground-belowground ecosystem multifunctionality and restoration success in a highly cost-efficient way.
人们普遍认为，恢复生物多样性将提高生物多样性和生态系统功能。然而，迄今为止，很少有研究评估恢复工作是否以及如何能够同时重建生物多样性和多种生态系统功能（生态系统多功能性）。在这里，我们量化了增加干预强度的三种恢复方法（仅收获<表土去除<表土去除+繁殖体添加）在恢复事件 22 年后如何影响草原生态系统多功能性。我们比较了恢复后的草地与强化管理和有针对性的半自然草地，基于 13 个生物和非生物、地上和地下特性。我们发现，与强化管理的草地相比，所有三种恢复方法都提高了生态系统多功能性，并朝着有针对性的半自然草地发展。然而，尽管干预强度较高的两种方法在 22 年后达到了有针对性的半自然草地的生态系统多功能性水平，但较低的干预水平则没有达到这一目标。此外，我们发现，表土去除加上或不加种子添加加速了生物和地上特性的恢复，并且尽管去除了土壤的顶层，但对非生物或地下特性没有发现长期的负面影响。我们还评估了哪些生态系统特性在准确性和成本效率方面是恢复成功的最佳指标。总的来说，我们证明了低成本措施比高成本措施相对能更好地解释生态系统多功能性的变化。植物物种丰富度是描述生态系统多功能性最准确的单个特性，因为它仅占我们综合多功能性方法成本的 4%，却解释了生态系统多功能性的 54%。植物物种丰富度是保护机构在恢复监测中通常使用的特性。植被结构、土壤碳储存和保水能力一起解释了生态系统多功能性的 70%，而这只需要植物物种丰富度成本的两倍（8%），我们认为这在未来的恢复监测项目中值得考虑。因此，我们的研究结果为土地管理者提供了一个指导，他们可以以非常高的成本效益的方式准确估计地上-地下生态系统多功能性和恢复成功。
