diversity-productivity relationship | ConservationBytes.com

Having more tree species makes us wealthier

28 01 2013

As more and more empirical evidence pours in from all corners of the globe, we can only draw one conclusion about the crude measure of species richness (i.e., number of species) – having more species around makes us richer.

And I’m not talking about the esoteric or ‘spiritual’ richness that the hippies dribble about around the campfire after a few dozen cones pulled off the bong (I’ll let the confused among you try to work the meaning of that one out by yourselves), I’m talking about real money (incorporated into my concept of ‘biowealth‘).

The idea that ‘more is better’ in terms of the number of species has traditionally found some (at times, conflicting) empirical support in the plant ecology literature, the latest evidence about which I wrote last year. This, the so-called ‘diversity-productivity’ relationship (DPR), demonstrates that as a forest or grass ecosystem gains more species, its average or total biomass production increases.

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Tags: biology, biowealth, boreal, carbon, climate change, diversity-productivity relationship, ecosystem services, environment, Forest, forestry, Monoculture, Scandinavia, species, temperate
Categories : biosequestration, carbon, climate change, conservation, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, extinction, harvest, logging, modelling

Different is better

6 03 2012

I found a nice complement to my More is Better post from January where I reported the results of a new meta-analysis demonstrating how higher species evenness and diversity engendered greater forest productivity – great empirical evidence for the so-called diversity-productivity relationship.

The latest paper adding convincing evidence regarding the important role of species diversity in maintaining ecosystem function comes from Marc Cadotte and colleagues published online early in Ecology. The paper, Phylogenetic diversity promotes ecosystem stability, looks at the problem from a slightly different angle.

If you recall from Zhang and colleagues, forest plots composed of many different species were more productive than single-species stands, and more ‘even’ (i.e., a metric which includes relative abundance of each species in system) stands were more productive, and better at explaining the variance in productivity than species richness alone.

Of course, species richness is considered only a blunt instrument to measure ‘biodiversity’, with evenness providing only a slight improvement. Ideally, we should be talking about genetic diversity considering this is the fundamental unit on which most of evolutionary processes operate (i.e., genes and gene complexes).

So Cadotte and colleagues measured genetic diversity within experimental plots of grassland savanna species established in Minnesota, USA (i.e., consisting of C3 grasses, C4 grasses, legumes, non-legume herbaceous forbs and two woody species) and compared this to ecosystem ‘stability’ (i.e., above-ground biomass divided by inter-annual standard deviation). They measured genetic diversity using four different metrics:

the sum of the phylogenetic branch lengths represented by a set of co-occurring species
the mean nearest taxon distance = the average of the shortest phylogenetic distance for each species to its closest relative
the mean pairwise distance = the average of all phylogenetic distances connecting species in the sample; and
an entropic measure based on the relative distribution of evolutionary distinctiveness, measured as the amount of a species’ evolutionary history that is not shared with other species Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: diversity-productivity relationship, Ecosystem, ecosystem stability, Genetic diversity, phylogeny, resilience, species, Species richness
Categories : biodiversity, conservation, genetic diversity, modelling

More is better

18 01 2012

In one of those rare moments of perusing the latest ecological literature, I stumbled across an absolute gem, and one that has huge conservation implications. Now, I’m really no expert in this particular area of ecology, but I dare say the paper I’m about to introduce should have been published in Nature or Science (I suspect it was submitted to at least one of these journals first). It was still published in an extremely high-impact journal in ecology though – the Journal of Ecology produced by the British Ecological Society (and one in which I too have had the honour of publishing an article).

Before I get into specifics, I have to say that one thing we conservation biologists tend to bang on about is that MORE SPECIES = BETTER, regardless of the ecosystem in question. We tend to value species richness as the gold standard of ecosystem ‘health’ and ‘resilience’, whether or not there is strong empirical evidence in support. It’s as if the more-is-better mantra strikes an intuitive chord and must, by all that’s ecologically right in the world, be true.

Of course, measuring what is ‘better’ is a difficult task, especially when we are talking about complex ecosystems comprising thousands, if not millions, of species. Does ‘better’ refer to the most temporally stable, the most genetically diverse, the most resilient to perturbation, or the provider of the greatest number of functions and hence, ecosystem services?

It’s up to you, but all these things tend to be difficult to measure for a large number of species and over time scales of sufficient duration to measure change. So the default for plants (i.e., the structural framework of almost all ecosystems) I guess has come down to a simpler measure of success – ‘productivity’. This essentially means how much biomass is produced per unit area/volume per time step. It’s not a great metric, but it’s probably one of the more readily quantifiable indices.

Enter the so-called ‘diversity-productivity relationship’, or ‘DPR’, which predicts that higher plant species diversity should engender higher net productivity (otherwise known as the ‘net biodiversity effect’). Read the rest of this entry »