Multiple plant diversity components drive consumer communities across ecosystems

Publikation: Beiträge in ZeitschriftenZeitschriftenaufsätzeForschungbegutachtet

Authors

  • Andreas Schuldt
  • Anne Ebeling
  • Matthias Kunz
  • Michael Staab
  • Claudia Guimarães-Steinicke
  • Dörte Bachmann
  • Nina Buchmann
  • Walter Durka
  • Felix Fornoff
  • Lionel Hertzog
  • Alexandra-Maria Klein
  • Christiane Roscher
  • Jörg Schaller
  • Goddert von Oheimb
  • Alexandra Weigelt
  • Wolfgang W. Weisser
  • Christian Wirth
  • Jiayong Zhang
  • Helge Bruelheide
  • Nico Eisenhauer

Humans modify ecosystems and biodiversity worldwide, with negative consequences for ecosystem functioning. Promoting plant diversity is increasingly suggested as a mitigation strategy. However, our mechanistic understanding of how plant diversity affects the diversity of heterotrophic consumer communities remains limited. Here, we disentangle the relative importance of key components of plant diversity as drivers of herbivore, predator, and parasitoid species richness in experimental forests and grasslands. We find that plant species richness effects on consumer species richness are consistently positive and mediated by elevated structural and functional diversity of the plant communities. The importance of these diversity components differs across trophic levels and ecosystems, cautioning against ignoring the fundamental ecological complexity of biodiversity effects. Importantly, plant diversity effects on higher trophic-level species richness are in many cases mediated by modifications of consumer abundances. In light of recently reported drastic declines in insect abundances, our study identifies important pathways connecting plant diversity and consumer diversity across ecosystems.

OriginalspracheEnglisch
Aufsatznummer1460
ZeitschriftNature Communications
Jahrgang10
Ausgabenummer1
Anzahl der Seiten11
ISSN2041-1723
DOIs
PublikationsstatusErschienen - 01.12.2019

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