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      Using Phylogenetic, Functional and Trait Diversity to Understand Patterns of Plant Community Productivity

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          Abstract

          Background

          Two decades of research showing that increasing plant diversity results in greater community productivity has been predicated on greater functional diversity allowing access to more of the total available resources. Thus, understanding phenotypic attributes that allow species to partition resources is fundamentally important to explaining diversity-productivity relationships.

          Methodology/Principal Findings

          Here we use data from a long-term experiment (Cedar Creek, MN) and compare the extent to which productivity is explained by seven types of community metrics of functional variation: 1) species richness, 2) variation in 10 individual traits, 3) functional group richness, 4) a distance-based measure of functional diversity, 5) a hierarchical multivariate clustering method, 6) a nonmetric multidimensional scaling approach, and 7) a phylogenetic diversity measure, summing phylogenetic branch lengths connecting community members together and may be a surrogate for ecological differences. Although most of these diversity measures provided significant explanations of variation in productivity, the presence of a nitrogen fixer and phylogenetic diversity were the two best explanatory variables. Further, a statistical model that included the presence of a nitrogen fixer, seed weight and phylogenetic diversity was a better explanation of community productivity than other models.

          Conclusions

          Evolutionary relationships among species appear to explain patterns of grassland productivity. Further, these results reveal that functional differences among species involve a complex suite of traits and that perhaps phylogenetic relationships provide a better measure of the diversity among species that contributes to productivity than individual or small groups of traits.

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          Most cited references76

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          Diversity and productivity in a long-term grassland experiment.

          Plant diversity and niche complementarity had progressively stronger effects on ecosystem functioning during a 7-year experiment, with 16-species plots attaining 2.7 times greater biomass than monocultures. Diversity effects were neither transients nor explained solely by a few productive or unviable species. Rather, many higher-diversity plots outperformed the best monoculture. These results help resolve debate over biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, show effects at higher than expected diversity levels, and demonstrate, for these ecosystems, that even the best-chosen monocultures cannot achieve greater productivity or carbon stores than higher-diversity sites.
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            GenBank® is a comprehensive database that contains publicly available DNA sequences for more than 165 000 named organisms, obtained primarily through submissions from individual laboratories and batch submissions from large-scale sequencing projects. Most submissions are made using the web-based BankIt or standalone Sequin programs and accession numbers are assigned by GenBank staff upon receipt. Daily data exchange with the EMBL Data Library in the UK and the DNA Data Bank of Japan helps to ensure worldwide coverage. GenBank is accessible through NCBI's retrieval system, Entrez, which integrates data from the major DNA and protein sequence databases along with taxonomy, genome, mapping, protein structure and domain information, and the biomedical journal literature via PubMed. BLAST provides sequence similarity searches of GenBank and other sequence databases. Complete bimonthly releases and daily updates of the GenBank database are available by FTP. To access GenBank and its related retrieval and analysis services, go to the NCBI Homepage at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
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              Vegetation classification by reference to strategies

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2009
                27 May 2009
                : 4
                : 5
                : e5695
                Affiliations
                [1 ]National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America
                [2 ]Department of Biological Sciences, University of Toronto - Scarborough, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
                [3 ]Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota, United States of America
                [4 ]Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States of America
                University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
                Author notes

                Conceived and designed the experiments: MC JCB DT TO. Performed the experiments: JCB DT. Analyzed the data: MC TO. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MC TO. Wrote the paper: MC JCB DT TO.

                Article
                09-PONE-RA-08822
                10.1371/journal.pone.0005695
                2682649
                19479086
                91b8ff9e-1bf6-4a54-957d-1e19c4f60b64
                Cadotte et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
                History
                : 19 February 2009
                : 16 April 2009
                Page count
                Pages: 9
                Categories
                Research Article
                Ecology/Community Ecology and Biodiversity
                Ecology/Evolutionary Ecology
                Ecology/Plant-Environment Interactions
                Evolutionary Biology/Evolutionary Ecology

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