The relationship between productivity and multiple aspects of biodiversity in six grassland communities |
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Authors: | David R. Chalcraft Brian J. Wilsey Christy Bowles Michael R. Willig |
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Affiliation: | (1) Department of Biology, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858-4353, USA;(2) Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA;(3) Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California – Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA;(4) Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-4210, USA |
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Abstract: | Biodiversity is a multifaceted concept but most studies examining the association between the biodiversity of a community and its productivity focus only on species richness. Consequently, studies are needed to examine how other facets of biodiversity vary with productivity if we want to have a better understanding of the distribution of biodiversity across our planet. We evaluated how a number of biodiversity measures (species richness, evenness, dominance, rarity, Simpson’s diversity, and Shannon–Weiner diversity) varied across natural productivity gradients at 6 grassland sites in the continental US. Variation in productivity did not account for a substantial amount of variation in any measure of biodiversity at small spatial scales (≈1 m2) at most sites. When productivity accounted for substantial variation in biodiversity, different measures of biodiversity responded to productivity in different ways. For example, dominance changed in a U-shaped fashion along a productivity gradient whereas richness increased in an asymptotic fashion. Consequently, diversity indices, which account for both species richness and evenness, varied in a hump-shaped fashion along the productivity gradient. Our results highlight that an exclusive focus on the association between species richness and productivity provides an incomplete picture of how a community’s biodiversity is related to its functioning. |
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Keywords: | Biodiversity Productivity Species richness Species evenness Diversity indices Grasslands |
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