HOW COMMUNITY ADAPTATION AFFECTS BIODIVERSITY ECOSYSTEM FUNCTIONING RELATIONSHIPS.

Aubree F, David P, Jarne P, Loreau M, Mouquet N and Calcagno V (2020).

Ecology Letters, 23, 1263-1275 doi:10.1111/ele.13530

Key message : This study reveals that evolutionary dynamics have a significant impact on the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Co-adapted communities, where traits have co-evolved, show different biodiversity-productivity, biodiversity-stability, and biodiversity-invasion relationships compared to randomly assembled communities. Community adaptation can even invert the slope of these relationships. Co-adapted communities exhibit reduced positive biodiversity-productivity relationships but remain highly tolerant to invasions, emphasizing the importance of considering evolutionary history for understanding ecosystem dynamics. Short-term experiments and recent observations may not accurately predict future outcomes once eco-evolutionary feedbacks come into play.

(a) Ecological parameters for the four scenarios considered: intrinsic growth rate (green), mono-specific abundance (orange) and competition is a(xs, x s) = 1. Red dots indicate the optimum ecological trait (b) Community formation. Species are sampled from a species pool within a given distribution. An ecological filter is then applied so that only the ecologically existing communities are kept. Then, species evolution towards their evolutionary equilibrium filters out some species (c) For each community, we measure two species trait metrics and the three types of functioning properties: (1) productivity, (2) stability, (3) response to invasion.

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OTHER TOPICS: Aesthetics of Biodiversity, Biogeography, Macroecology & Ecophylogenetics, Experimental Evolution, Functional Biogeography, Functional Rarity, Nature for Future, Metacommunities, Metaecosystems, Reviews and Synthesis, Trophic Biogeography & Metaweb