Functional identity and diversity of animals predict ecosystem functioning better than species-based indices

2015/01/07 by Vesna Gagic, Vesna Gagić, Ignasi Bartomeus +15 · 698 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · #Abundance (ecology) #Animal Ecology and Behavior Studies #Biodiversity #Biology #Complementarity (molecular biology) #Computer science #Dominance (genetics) #Ecology #Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies #Ecosystem #Plant and animal studies #Relative species abundance #Species richness #Trait

paper · pdf · doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.2620

published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences 282(1801), 20142620 (Royal Society)

openalex publication_date 2015/01/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31

Abstract

Drastic biodiversity declines have raised concerns about the deterioration of ecosystem functions and have motivated much recent research on the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem functioning. A functional trait framework has been proposed to improve the mechanistic understanding of this relationship, but this has rarely been tested for organisms other than plants. We analysed eight datasets, including five animal groups, to examine how well a trait-based approach, compared with a more traditional taxonomic approach, predicts seven ecosystem functions below- and above-ground. Trait-based indices consistently provided greater explanatory power than species richness or abundance. The frequency distributions of single or multiple traits in the community were the best predictors of ecosystem functioning. This implies that the ecosystem functions we investigated were underpinned by the combination of trait identities (i.e. single-trait indices) and trait complementarity (i.e. multi-trait indices) in the communities. Our study provides new insights into the general mechanisms that link biodiversity to ecosystem functioning in natural animal communities and suggests that the observed responses were due to the identity and dominance patterns of the trait composition rather than the number or abundance of species per se.

Citations

• NEW MULTIDIMENSIONAL FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITY INDICES FOR A MULTIFACETED FRAMEWORK IN FUNCTIONAL ECOLOGY
• A distance‐based framework for measuring functional diversity from multiple traits

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