Department of Biology and Marine Biology, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, North Carolina, USA.
Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network, MarineGEO, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Edgewater, Maryland, USA.
Ecology. 2022 Nov;103(11):e3796. doi: 10.1002/ecy.3796. Epub 2022 Jul 27.
Relatively few studies have attempted to resolve the pathways through which the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning cascade from one trophic level to another. Here, we manipulated the richness of habitat-forming seaweeds in a western Atlantic estuary to explore how changes in foundation species diversity affect the structure and functioning of the benthic consumer communities that they support. Structural equation modeling revealed that macroalgal richness enhanced invertebrate abundance, biomass, and diversity, both directly by changing the quality and palatability of the foundational substrate and indirectly by increasing the total biomass of available habitat. Consumer responses were largely driven by a single foundational seaweed, although stronger complementarity among macroalgae was observed for invertebrate richness. These findings with diverse foundational phyla extend earlier inferences from terrestrial grasslands by showing that biodiversity effects can simultaneously propagate through multiple independent pathways to maintain animal foodwebs. Our work also highlights the potential ramifications of human-induced changes in marine ecosystems.
相对较少的研究试图解决生物多样性对生态系统功能的影响从一个营养级到另一个营养级级联的途径。在这里，我们操纵了西大西洋河口形成栖息地的海藻的丰富度，以探讨基础物种多样性的变化如何影响它们支持的底栖消费者群落的结构和功能。结构方程模型表明，宏观藻类的丰富度通过直接改变基础基质的质量和可食性以及间接通过增加可用栖息地的总生物量来增加无脊椎动物的丰度、生物量和多样性。消费者的反应主要是由一种单一的基础海藻驱动的，尽管在宏观藻类之间观察到更强的互补性。这些发现与不同的基础门扩展了早期从陆地草原推断的结论，表明生物多样性效应可以同时通过多个独立的途径传播，以维持动物食物网。我们的工作还强调了人类引起的海洋生态系统变化的潜在后果。
