Journal
ECOLOGY
Volume 97, Issue 10, Pages 2772-2779Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/ecy.1499
Keywords
dominance; functional traits; multifunctionality; secondary forest; species richness; tropical forest
Categories
Funding
- SEP-CONACYT [2009-129740]
- NSF [DEB 1147429, DEB 0639393]
- NSF-LTREB
- research program ALW [863.15.017]
- Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
- Wageningen University and Research
- NWO-WOTRO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research-Science for Global Development) [W85-326]
- MABOTRO [SEMARNAT-CONACYT 2002-C01-0597, SEP-CONACYT CB-2005-01-51043, PAPIIT-DGAPA IN213714]
- DiverSus project [IAI CRN 2015, SGP-CRA2015]
- European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) [283093]
- Division Of Environmental Biology
- Direct For Biological Sciences [1147429] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Many studies suggest that biodiversity may be particularly important for ecosystem multifunctionality, because different species with different traits can contribute to different functions. Support, however, comes mostly from experimental studies conducted at small spatial scales in low-diversity systems. Here, we test whether different species contribute to different ecosystem functions that are important for carbon cycling in a high-diversity human-modified tropical forest landscape in Southern Mexico. We quantified aboveground standing biomass, primary productivity, litter production, and wood decomposition at the landscape level, and evaluated the extent to which tree species contribute to these ecosystem functions. We used simulations to tease apart the effects of species richness, species dominance and species functional traits on ecosystem functions. We found that dominance was more important than species traits in determining a species' contribution to ecosystem functions. As a consequence of the high dominance in human-modified landscapes, the same small subset of species mattered across different functions. In human-modified landscapes in the tropics, biodiversity may play a limited role for ecosystem multifunctionality due to the potentially large effect of species dominance on biogeochemical functions. However, given the spatial and temporal turnover in species dominance, biodiversity may be critically important for the maintenance and resilience of ecosystem functions.
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