Department of Zoology, School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
Theoretical and Experimental Ecological Station, CNRS, Moulis, France.
Nat Commun. 2021 Aug 27;12(1):5167. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-25507-5.
Ensuring reliable supply of services from nature is key to the sustainable development and well-being of human societies. Varied and frequently complex relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem services have, however, frustrated our capacity to quantify and predict the vulnerability of those services to species extinctions. Here, we use a qualitative Boolean modelling framework to identify universal drivers of the robustness of ecosystem service supply to species loss. These drivers comprise simple features of the networks that link species to the functions they perform that, in turn, underpin a service. Together, they define what we call network fragility. Using data from >250 real ecological networks representing services such as pollination and seed-dispersal, we demonstrate that network fragility predicts remarkably well the robustness of empirical ecosystem services. We then show how to quantify contributions of individual species to ecosystem service robustness, enabling quantification of how vulnerability scales from species to services. Our findings provide general insights into the way species, functional traits, and the links between them together determine the vulnerability of ecosystem service supply to biodiversity loss.
确保自然服务的可靠供应是人类社会可持续发展和福祉的关键。然而，生物多样性和生态系统服务之间复杂多样的关系，使我们难以量化和预测这些服务对物种灭绝的脆弱性。在这里，我们使用定性布尔模型框架来确定物种丧失对生态系统服务供应稳健性的普遍驱动因素。这些驱动因素包括将物种与其功能联系起来的网络的简单特征，而这些功能则支撑着一项服务。它们共同定义了我们所说的网络脆弱性。利用来自代表授粉和种子传播等服务的 250 多个真实生态网络的数据，我们证明网络脆弱性可以很好地预测经验生态系统服务的稳健性。然后，我们展示如何量化单个物种对生态系统服务稳健性的贡献，从而能够量化从物种到服务的脆弱性如何扩展。我们的研究结果提供了关于物种、功能特征以及它们之间联系共同决定生态系统服务供应对生物多样性丧失脆弱性的方式的一般见解。
