Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 289, Issue 1967, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.1694
Keywords
functional rarity; functional distinctiveness; biodiversity and ecosystem functioning; productivity; virtual ecology; forest-gap model
Categories
Funding
- Fondation pour la Recherche sur la Biodiversite (FRB)
- Electricite de France (EDF)
- European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant Project Ecophysiological and biophysical constraints on domestication in crop plants' [ERC-StG-2014-639706-CONSTRAINTS]
- DIVERSITAS/Future Earth
- German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
- BACI [640176]
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This study investigates the impact of species with functional distinctiveness on ecosystem productivity. The findings suggest that under harsh environmental conditions, the loss of distinct species leads to a long-term decrease in ecosystem productivity. On the other hand, productivity is more dependent on ordinary species in milder environments.
Despite evidence of a positive effect of functional diversity on ecosystem productivity, the importance of functionally distinct species (i.e. species that display an original combination of traits) is poorly understood. To investigate how distinct species affect ecosystem productivity, we used a forest-gap model to simulate realistic temperate forest successions along an environmental gradient and measured ecosystem productivity at the end of the successional trajectories. We performed 10 560 simulations with different sets and numbers of species, bearing either distinct or indistinct functional traits, and compared them to random assemblages, to mimic the consequences of a regional loss of species. Long-term ecosystem productivity dropped when distinct species were lost first from the regional pool of species, under the harshest environmental conditions. On the contrary, productivity was more dependent on ordinary species in milder environments. Our findings show that species functional distinctiveness, integrating multiple trait dimensions, can capture species-specific effects on ecosystem productivity. In a context of an environmentally changing world, they highlight the need to investigate the role of distinct species in sustaining ecosystem processes, particularly in extreme environmental conditions.
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