Biodiversity increases the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate extremes

Isbell, Forest; Craven, Dylan; Connolly, John; Loreau, Michel; Schmid, Bernhard; Beierkuhnlein, Carl; Bezemer, T. Martijn; Bonin, Catherine; Bruelheide, Helge; de Luca, Enrica; Ebeling, Anne; Griffin, John N.; Guo, Qinfeng; Hautier, Yann; Hector, Andy; Jentsch, Anke; Kreyling, Jurgen; Lanta, Vojtech; Manning, Pete; Meyer, Sebastian T.; Mori, Akira S.; Naeem, Shahid; Niklaus, Pascal A.; Polley, H. Wayne; Reich, Peter B.; Roscher, Christiane; Seabloom, Eric W.; Smith, Melinda D.; Thakur, Madhav P.; Tilman, David; Tracy, Benjamin F.; van der Putten, Wim H.; van Ruijven, Jasper; Weigelt, Alexandra; Weisser, Wolfgang W.; Wilsey, Brian; Eisenhauer, Nico     «

Isbell, Forest; Craven, Dylan; Connolly, John; Loreau, Michel; Schmid, Bernhard; Beierkuhnlein, Carl; Bezemer, T. Martijn; Bonin, Catherine; Bruelheide, Helge; de Luca, Enrica; Ebeling, Anne; Griffin, John N.; Guo, Qinfeng; Hautier, Yann; Hector, Andy; Jentsch, Anke; Kreyling, Jurgen; Lanta, Vojtech; Manning, Pete; Meyer, Sebastian T.; Mori, Akira S.; Naeem, Shahid; Niklaus, Pascal A.; Polley, H. Wayne; Reich, Peter B.; Roscher, Christiane; Seabloom, Eric W.; Smith, Melinda D.; Thakur, Madhav P....     »

Can biodiversity help protect ecosystems from extreme conditions? This study points to a promising answer: Increasing plant diversity decreases the extent to which extremely wet or dry conditions disrupt grassland productivity. An international team of researchers from the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Ireland, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Czech Republic and Japan, that included Sebastian Meyer and Wolfgang Weisser from the Terrestrial Ecology Research group, combined results across 46 grassland studies, including long-time data from the Jena Experiment. The analysis classified each year of each experiment on a five-point scale from extremely dry to extremely wet. They measured productivity - basically, how much above-ground plant material each level of plant biodiversity produced each year was compared between diversity levels and climatic conditions. Results proved that the higher the plant biodiversity, the lower the variability in productivity during wet or dry climate events. Overall, productivity of communities with only one or two species changed an average of 50 percent during events, while those with 16 to - 32 species changed only half that much. Biodiversity did not, however, seem to strongly influence how quickly a site returned to normal productivity after wet or dry events.     «

Can biodiversity help protect ecosystems from extreme conditions? This study points to a promising answer: Increasing plant diversity decreases the extent to which extremely wet or dry conditions disrupt grassland productivity. An international team of researchers from the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Ireland, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Czech Republic and Japan, that included Sebastian Meyer and Wolfgang Weisser from the Terrestrial Ecology Research group, combined results across 46 grass...     »