Abstract
Biodiversity loss can affect ecosystem functions and services1, 2,
3, 4. Individual ecosystem functions generally show a positive asymptotic
relationship with increasing biodiversity, suggesting that some species
are redundant5, 6, 7, 8. However, ecosystems are managed and conserved
for multiple functions, which may require greater biodiversity. Here
we present an analysis of published data from grassland biodiversity
experiments9, 10, 11, and show that ecosystem multifunctionality
does require greater numbers of species. We analysed each ecosystem
function alone to identify species with desirable effects. We then
calculated the number of species with positive effects for all possible
combinations of functions. Our results show appreciable differences
in the sets of species influencing different ecosystem functions,
with average proportional overlap of about 0.2 to 0.5. Consequently,
as more ecosystem processes were included in our analysis, more species
were found to affect overall functioning. Specifically, for all of
the analysed experiments, there was a positive saturating relationship
between the number of ecosystem processes considered and the number
of species influencing overall functioning. We conclude that because
different species often influence different functions, studies focusing
on individual processes in isolation will underestimate levels of
biodiversity required to maintain multifunctional ecosystems.
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