State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Department of Geography, Remote Sensing Laboratories, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Nat Ecol Evol. 2021 Dec;5(12):1594-1603. doi: 10.1038/s41559-021-01564-3. Epub 2021 Nov 4.
Forest restoration increases global forest area and ecosystem services such as primary productivity and carbon storage. How tree species functional composition impacts the provisioning of these services as forests develop is sparsely studied. We used 10-year data from 478 plots with 191,200 trees in a forest biodiversity experiment in subtropical China to assess the relationship between community productivity and community-weighted mean (CWM) or functional diversity (FD) values of 38 functional traits. We found that effects of FD values on productivity became larger than effects of CWM values after 7 years of forest development and that the FD values also became more reliable predictors of productivity than the CWM values. In contrast to CWM, FD values consistently increased productivity across ten different species-pool subsets. Our results imply that to promote productivity in the long term it is imperative for forest restoration projects to plant multispecies communities with large functional diversity.
森林恢复增加了全球森林面积和生态系统服务，如初级生产力和碳储存。树木物种功能组成如何影响森林发展过程中这些服务的提供，这方面的研究还很少。我们利用中国亚热带地区一个森林生物多样性实验中的 478 个样地、191200 棵树的 10 年数据，评估了 38 个功能性状的群落生产力与群落加权均值（CWM）或功能多样性（FD）值之间的关系。我们发现，FD 值对生产力的影响在森林发展 7 年后大于 CWM 值的影响，而且 FD 值比 CWM 值更能可靠地预测生产力。与 CWM 不同的是，FD 值在十个不同的物种库子集中都能持续提高生产力。我们的研究结果表明，为了长期促进生产力，森林恢复项目必须种植具有较大功能多样性的多物种群落。
