Plant Species Richness and Ecosystem Multifunctionality in Global Drylands

• Published in: Science
• Main Authors: Maestre, Fernando, Quero, José, Gotelli, Nicholas, Escudero, Adrián, Ochoa, Victoria, Delgado-Baquerizo, Manuel, García-Gómez, Miguel, Bowker, Matthew, Soliveres, Santiago, Escolar, Cristina, García-Palacios, Pablo, Berdugo, Miguel, Valencia Gómez, Enrique, Gozalo, Beatriz, Gallardo, Antonio, Aguilera, Lorgio, Arredondo, Tulio, Blones, Julio, Boeken, Bertrand, Bran, Donaldo, Conceição, Abel, Cabrera, Omar, Chaieb, Mohamed, Derak, Mchich, Eldridge, David, Espinosa, Carlos, Florentino, Adriana, Gaitán, Juan, Gatica, Gabriel, Ghiloufi, Wahida, Gómez González, Susana, Gutiérrez, Julio, Hernández, Rosa, Huang, Xuewen, Huber Sannwald, Elisabeth, Jankju, Mohammad, Miriti, Maria, Monerris, Jorge, Mau, Rebecca, Morici, Ernesto, Naseri, Kamal, Ospina, Abelardo, Polo, Vicente, Prina, Aníbal, Pucheta, Eduardo, Ramírez Collantes, David, Romão, Roberto, Tighe, Matthew, Torres-Díaz, Cristian, Val, James, Veiga, José, Wang, Deli, Zaady, Eli
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science 2012
• Subjects: 581.5; Botánica (Biología); 2417.13 Ecología Vegetal; Possession Island; Crozet Islands
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/94909; https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1215442

Acknowledgments: The long-term data on the demography and foraging ecology of wandering albatrosses at Possession Island, Crozet Islands, were supported by the French Polar Institute IPEV (program no. 109 to H.W.), with additional funding from the Prince Albert II de Monaco Foundation. The study is a contribution to the Program ANR Biodiversité 2005-11 REMIGE. We acknowledge the modeling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), and the World Climate Research Programme’s (WCRP’s) Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP-3 multimodel data set. Support for data and model selection was provided by S. Jenouvrier. We thank the many field workers involved in the Crozet long-term monitoring since 1966 and in tracking programs since 1989, and D. Besson for help with the management of the demographic database. M.L. was funded by a postdoctoral contract of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (Ref. EX2007-1148) and Marie Curie Individual Fellowship (PIEF-GA-2008-220063). We are grateful to L. Riotte-Lambert for help with data analysis and C. Barbraud, C. A. Bost, Y. Cherel, and S. Jenouvrier for comments on the manuscript. Experiments suggest that biodiversity enhances the ability of ecosystems to maintain multiple functions, such as carbon storage, productivity, and the buildup of nutrient pools (multifunctionality). However, the relationship between biodiversity and multifunctionality has never been assessed globally in natural ecosystems. We report here on a global empirical study relating plant species richness and abiotic factors to multifunctionality in drylands, which collectively cover 41% of Earth’s land surface and support over 38% of the human population. Multifunctionality was positively and significantly related to species richness. The best-fitting models accounted for over 55% of the variation in multifunctionality and always included species richness as a predictor variable. Our results suggest that the ...