Science and Technology Production
The 66th IAVS Annual Symposium 2024 - No general support of functional diversity enhancing resilience across terrestrial plant communities
Congress
Authorship:
LIPOMA, MARIA LUCRECIA ; Kambach, Stephan ; Díaz, Sandra ; Sabatini, Francesco María ; Damasceno, Gabriella ; Kattge, Jens ; Wirth, Christian ; Abella, Scott R. ; Beierkuhnlein, Carl ; Belote, Travis R. ; Bernhardt Römermann, Markus ; Craven, Dylan ; Dolezal, Jiri ; Eisenhauer, Nico ; Isbell, Forest ; Jentsch, Anke ; Kreyling, Jürgen ; Lanta, Vojtech ; Le Stradic, Soizig ; Leps, Jan ; Manninen, Outi ; Mariotte, Pierre ; Reich, Peter B. ; Ruppert, Jan C. ; Schmidt, Wolfgang ; Tilman, David ; van Ruijven, Jasper ; Wagg, Cameron ; Wardle, David A. ; Wilsey, Brien ; Bruelheide, HelgeDate:
2025Publishing House and Editing Place:
International Association of Vegetation ScienceSummary *
Understanding the mechanisms promoting resilience in plant communities is crucial in times of increasing global environmental change. Here, we present the first meta-analysis evaluating the relationship between functional diversity and resilience of plant communities. Specifically, we tested whether the resilience of plant communities is positively correlated with interspecific trait variation (following the niche-complementarity hypothesis) and the dominance of acquisitive and small-size species (following the mass-ratio hypothesis), and for the context-dependent effects of ecological and methodological differences across studies. We compiled a dataset of 69 independent sites from 26 studies that quantified resilience. We conducted a meta-analysis based on correlation coefficients between functional diversity and resilience of biomass and floristic composition. In general, we found no positive functional diversity-resilience relationships of grand mean effect sizes. In contrast to our expectations, we encountered a negative relationship between resilience and trait variety, especially in woody ecosystems, whereas there was a positive relationship between resilience and the dominance of acquisitive species in herbaceous ecosystems. Finally, the functional diversity-resilience relationships were strongly affected by both ecological (biome and disturbance properties) and methodological (temporal scale, study design and resilience metric) characteristics. We rejected our hypothesis of a general positive functional diversity-resilience relationship. In addition to strong context-dependency, we propose that idiosyncratic effects of single resident species present in the communities before the disturbances and biological legacies could play major roles in the resilience of terrestrial plant communities. Information provided by the agent in SIGEVAKey Words
ResilienciaDiversidad funcionalmeta-analysis