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Contributed Talk

Session: : Ecosystem Function: Biodiversity 1

COS 102-5 - Biodiversity promotes ecosystem functioning despite environmental changes: a meta-analysis

Tuesday, August 8, 2023
2:30 PM – 2:45 PM PDT
Location: D139

    Presenting Author(s)

  • PH

    Pubin Hong

    Institute of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, China (People's Republic)

    • Coauthor(s)

  • BS

    Bernhard Schmid

    Remote Sensing Laboratories, Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland

  • FD

    Frederik De Laender

    Research Unit of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, Namur Institute of Complex Systems, and Institute of Life, Earth, and the Environment, University of Namur
    JYVÄSKYLÄ, Belgium

  • NE

    Nico Eisenhauer

    German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
    Leipzig, Sachsen, Germany

  • XZ

    Xingwen Zhang

    School of Mathematics and Statistics, Yunnan University, China (People's Republic)

  • HC

    Haozhen Chen

    Institute of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Science, and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, China (People's Republic)

  • DC

    Dylan Craven

    Universidad Mayor, Chile

  • HD

    Hans J. De Boeck

    Plants and Ecosystems (PLECO), Department of Biology, University of Antwerp, Belgium

  • YH

    Yann Hautier

    Utrecht University, Netherlands

  • OP

    Owen L. Petchey

    Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich
    Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  • PR

    Peter B. Reich, Ph.D.

    Professor
    University of Minnesota; Institute for Global Change Biology, University of Michigan, Minnesota, United States

  • BS

    Bastian Steudel

    Department of Health and Environmental Sciences, Xi'an Jiaotong- Liverpool University, China (People's Republic)

  • MS

    Maren Striebel

    Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, Carl Von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany

  • MT

    Madhav P. Thakur

    Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Bern, Switzerland

  • sw

    shaopeng wang

    Peking University, China (People's Republic)

Abstract: Global environmental changes are altering biodiversity and ecosystem processes at multiple scales and thus probably impair the functioning and services ecosystems provide for human society. Three decades of biodiversity research suggested that biodiversity can enhance ecosystem functioning via complementarity and selection effects. However, it is unclear whether positive effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning still persist under various types of global environmental change drivers. It means that global environmental changes can interact with biodiversity and further influence ecosystem functioning. For example, environmental changes might shift the strength or even the types of species interactions and/or the community composition and further alter complementarity and/or selection effects. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis of 46 experiments manipulating both species richness and environments to test how environmental change drivers (warming, drought, nutrient and CO2 enrichment) affect biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships across three taxonomic groups (microbes, phytoplankton and plants). Our results showed that biodiversity promoted ecosystem functioning in both ambient and manipulated environmental conditions but not to the same degree. Specifically, positive biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning increased with stress intensity induced by global environmental change drivers, which is consistent with the scenario of stress gradient hypothesis. Based on a subset of datasets, it showed that environmental change drivers might influence biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships mainly via altering complementarity effects. Meanwhile, the positive effects of biodiversity increased with experimental time in both ambient and manipulated environmental conditions. Our results suggest that communities with high biodiversity are more resistant to environmental changes and biodiversity provides an important biological buffer to maintain ecosystem functioning in the face of global environmental changes. Hence, biodiversity conservation is a key strategy to maintain ecosystem functioning especially in future environment. Our study also advocates that more empirical and theoretical efforts are needed to better understand the interactions between biodiversity and environmental changes.