Cascading effects of long-term land-use changes on plant traits and ecosystem functioning

A new framework for measuring functional diversity (FD) from multiple traits has recently been proposed. This framework was mostly limited to quantitative traits without missing values and to situations in which there are more species than traits, although the authors had suggested a way to extend their framework to other trait types. The main purpose of this note is to further develop this suggestion. We describe a highly flexible distance-based framework to measure different facets of FD in multidimensional trait space from any distance or dissimilarity measure, any number of traits, and from different trait types (i.e., quantitative, semi-quantitative, and qualitative). This new approach allows for missing trait values and the weighting of individual traits. We also present a new multidimensional FD index, called functional dispersion (FDis), which is closely related to Rao's quadratic entropy. FDis is the multivariate analogue of the weighted mean absolute deviation (MAD), in which the weights are species relative abundances. For unweighted presence-absence data, FDis can be used for a formal statistical test of differences in FD. We provide the "FD" R language package to easily implement our distance-based FD framework.

Concern is growing about the consequences of biodiversity loss for ecosystem functioning, for the provision of ecosystem services, and for human well being. Experimental evidence for a relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem process rates is compelling, but the issue remains contentious. Here, we present the first rigorous quantitative assessment of this relationship through meta-analysis of experimental work spanning 50 years to June 2004. We analysed 446 measures of biodiversity effects (252 in grasslands), 319 of which involved primary producer manipulations or measurements. Our analyses show that: biodiversity effects are weaker if biodiversity manipulations are less well controlled; effects of biodiversity change on processes are weaker at the ecosystem compared with the community level and are negative at the population level; productivity-related effects decline with increasing number of trophic links between those elements manipulated and those measured; biodiversity effects on stability measures ('insurance' effects) are not stronger than biodiversity effects on performance measures. For those ecosystem services which could be assessed here, there is clear evidence that biodiversity has positive effects on most. Whilst such patterns should be further confirmed, a precautionary approach to biodiversity management would seem prudent in the meantime.

Worldwide decomposition rates depend both on climate and the legacy of plant functional traits as litter quality. To quantify the degree to which functional differentiation among species affects their litter decomposition rates, we brought together leaf trait and litter mass loss data for 818 species from 66 decomposition experiments on six continents. We show that: (i) the magnitude of species-driven differences is much larger than previously thought and greater than climate-driven variation; (ii) the decomposability of a species' litter is consistently correlated with that species' ecological strategy within different ecosystems globally, representing a new connection between whole plant carbon strategy and biogeochemical cycling. This connection between plant strategies and decomposability is crucial for both understanding vegetation-soil feedbacks, and for improving forecasts of the global carbon cycle.