Multiple plant diversity components drive consumer communities across ecosystems
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Authors
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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1460 |
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| ISSN | 2041-1723 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 01.12.2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:
We thank Xuefei Yang, Chen Lin, Sabine Both, Xiaojuan Liu, Yang Bo, Keping Ma and all members of the BEF-China consortium who coordinated and helped with the establishment and maintenance of the experiment. We thank the technical staff of the Jena Experiment consortium for their work in maintaining the field site and many student helpers for weeding of the experimental plots and support during measurements. We acknowledge Eric Anton, Theo Blick, Frank Creutzburg, Günter Köhler, Gerlinde Kratzsch, Michael Meyer, Christoph Muster, and Oliver Wiche for their tremendous work of grassland arthropod identification. We are grateful to Stefan Michalski for providing phylogenetic plant data. We are indebted to our many helpers who contributed to the sampling of arthropods and plant data in the experiments. We gratefully acknowledge funding by the German Research Foundation (DFG FOR 891/1-3), the Sino-German Centre for Research Promotion (GZ 524, 592, 698, 699, 785, and 1020), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 30710103907 and 30930005). The Jena Experiment is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG FOR 1451) with additional support from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the Max Planck Society, and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). A.S., H.B., and N.E. acknowledge support by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig (DFG FZT 118). N.E. acknowledges funding by the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant; grant agreement no. 677232). We acknowledge the financial support of the Open Access PublicationFund of the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. We thank theBiodiversity Informatics Unit of iDiv for providingsupport with the data quality checks and uploading to the data repository.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, The Author(s).
- Ecosystems Research
- Sustainability Science