Biodiversity increases the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate extremes

Forest Isbell (1) , Dylan Craven (2, 3) , John Connolly (4) , Michel Loreau (5) , Bernhard Schmid (6) , Carl Beierkuhnlein (7) , T. Martijn Bezemer (8) , Catherine Bonin (9) , Helge Bruelheide (2, 10) , Enrica De Luca (6) , Anne Ebeling (11) , John N. Griffin (12) , Qinfeng Guo (13) , Yann Hautier (14) , Andy Hector (15) , Anke Jentsch (7) , Jürgen Kreyling (16) , Vojtěch Lanta (17) , Pete Manning (18) , Sebastian T. Meyer (19) , Akira S. Mori (20) , Shahid Naeem (21) , Pascal A. Niklaus (6) , H. Wayne Polley (22) , Peter B. Reich (1, 23) , Christiane Roscher (2, 24) , Eric W. Seabloom (1) , Melinda D. Smith (25) , Madhav P. Thakur (2, 3) , David Tilman (1, 26) , Benjamin F. Tracy (27) , Wim H. van Der Putten (8, 28) , Jasper Van Ruijven (28) , Alexandra Weigelt (2, 3) , Wolfgang W. Weisser (19) , Brian Wilsey (9) , Nico Eisenhauer (2, 3)

1 UMN - University of Minnesota [Twin Cities]
2 iDiv - German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research
3 Leipzig University / Universität Leipzig
4 UCD - University College Dublin [Dublin]
5 SEEM - Station d’Ecologie Expérimentale du CNRS à Moulis
6 UZH - Universität Zürich [Zürich] = University of Zurich
7 University of Bayreuth
8 NIOO-KNAW - Netherlands Institute of Ecology
9 ISU - Iowa State University
10 Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg
11 Friedrich-Schiller-Universität = Friedrich Schiller University Jena [Jena, Germany]
12 Swansea University
13 Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center
14 Universiteit Utrecht / Utrecht University [Utrecht]
15 University of Oxford
16 Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald
17 University of South Bohemia
18 UNIBE - Universität Bern / University of Bern
19 TUM - Technische Universität Munchen - Technical University Munich - Université Technique de Munich
20 Yokohama National University
21 Columbia University [New York]
22 US Department of Agriculture/Agricultural Research Service [Houston, TX, USA]
23 Western Sydney University
24 UFZ - Helmholtz Zentrum für Umweltforschung = Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research
25 CSU - Colorado State University [Fort Collins]
26 UC Santa Barbara - University of California [Santa Barbara]
27 Department of Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences
28 WUR - Wageningen University and Research [Wageningen]

It remains unclear whether biodiversity buffers ecosystems against climate extremes, which are becoming increasingly frequent worldwide. Early results suggested that the ecosystem productivity of diverse grassland plant communities was more resistant, changing less during drought, and more resilient, recovering more quickly after drought, than that of depauperate communities. However, subsequent experimental tests produced mixed results. Here we use data from 46 experiments that manipulated grassland plant diversity to test whether biodiversity provides resistance during and resilience after climate events. We show that biodiversity increased ecosystem resistance for a broad range of climate events, including wet or dry, moderate or extreme, and brief or prolonged events. Across all studies and climate events, the productivity of low-diversity communities with one or two species changed by approximately 50% during climate events, whereas that of high-diversity communities with 16–32 species was more resistant, changing by only approximately 25%. By a year after each climate event, ecosystem productivity had often fully recovered, or overshot, normal levels of productivity in both high- and low-diversity communities, leading to no detectable dependence of ecosystem resilience on biodiversity. Our results suggest that biodiversity mainly stabilizes ecosystem productivity, and productivity-dependent ecosystem services, by increasing resistance to climate events. Anthropogenic environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss thus seem likely to decrease ecosystem stability14, and restoration of biodiversity to increase it, mainly by changing the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate events.

Mots clés: Biodiversity; Climate-change ecology; Ecosystem ecology; Grassland ecology

Domaines: Biodiversité et Ecologie

Forest Isbell, Dylan Craven, John Connolly, Michel Loreau, Bernhard Schmid, et al.. Biodiversity increases the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate extremes. Nature, 2015, 526, pp.574-577. ⟨10.1038/nature15374⟩. ⟨hal-02959854⟩