Impacts of species richness on productivity in a large-scale subtropical forest experiment

2018-10-05

Huang, Yuanyuan

Chen, Yuxin

Castro-Izaguirre, Nadia

Baruffol, Martin

Brezzi, Matteo

Lang, Anne

Li, Ying

Härdtle, Werner

Von Oheimb, Goddert

Yang, Xuefei

Liu, Xiaojuan

Pei, Kequan

Both, Sabine

Yang, Bo

Eichenberg, David

Assmann, Thorsten

Bauhus, Jürgen

Behrens, Thorsten

Buscot, François

Chen, Xiao-Yong

Chesters, Douglas

Ding, Bing-Yang

Durka, Walter

Erfmeier, Alexandra

Fang, Jingyun

Fischer, Markus

Guo, Liang-Dong

Guo, Dali

Gutknecht, Jessica L M

He, Jin-Sheng

He, Chun-Ling

Hector, Andy

Hönig, Lydia

Hu, Ren-Yong

Klein, Alexandra-Maria

Kühn, Peter

Liang, Yu

Li, Shan

Michalski, Stefan

Scherer-Lorenzen, Michael

Schmidt, Karsten

Scholten, Thomas

Schuldt, Andreas

Shi, Xuezheng

Tan, Man-Zhi

Tang, Zhiyao

Trogisch, Stefan

Wang, Zhengwen

Welk, Erik

Wirth, Christian

Wubet, Tesfaye

Xiang, Wenhua

Yu, Mingjian

Yu, Xiao-Dong

Zhang, Jiayong

Zhang, Shouren

Zhang, Naili

Zhou, Hong-Zhang

Zhu, Chao-Dong

Zhu, Li

Bruelheide, Helge

Ma, Keping

Niklaus, Pascal A

Schmid, Bernhard

Journal Article

en

Publication

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

United States of America

10.1126/science.aat6405

une:1959.11/30569

Biodiversity experiments have shown that species loss reduces ecosystem functioning in grassland. To test whether this result can be extrapolated to forests, the main contributors to terrestrial primary productivity, requires large-scale experiments. We manipulated tree species richness by planting more than 150,000 trees in plots with 1 to 16 species. Simulating multiple extinction scenarios, we found that richness strongly increased stand-level productivity. After 8 years, 16-species mixtures had accumulated over twice the amount of carbon found in average monocultures and similar amounts as those of two commercial monocultures. Species richness effects were strongly associated with functional and phylogenetic diversity. A shrub addition treatment reduced tree productivity, but this reduction was smaller at high shrub species richness. Our results encourage multispecies afforestation strategies to restore biodiversity and mitigate climate change.

link

Science, 362(6410), p. 80-83

1095-9203

0036-8075

0096-3771

30287660

80

83