Collaborative Research: The role of species dominance in mediating biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships across spatial scales

生态系统服务，或大自然给人类带来的好处，包括许多对地球上生命至关重要的功能，如碳储存、水净化和授粉。二十年来的生态学实验和理论已经清楚地表明，生物多样性在生态系统功能中起着重要作用，因此含有更多物种的生物群落具有更高水平的生态系统功能。然而，几乎所有这些研究都是在小规模和实验控制条件下进行的，可能无法代表现实世界的生态系统。该项目将弥合科学家在较小实验尺度上对生物多样性-生态系统功能关系的广泛知识与生物多样性在推动现实世界景观尺度上的生态系统服务方面的很大程度上未知的作用之间的差距。研究人员将研究野生昆虫传粉媒介对本地野花的传粉作用，以确定当空间尺度从单个植物群落增加到整个景观时，需要多少传粉媒介物种才能为所有研究地点提供足够的传粉。具体来说，他们将测试关于在现实世界中提供足够的生态系统服务所需的物种数量如何比实验中发现的更多或更少的对比预测。本研究结果将对生态系统服务管理和生物多样性保护具有重要的应用价值。这将是第一个研究群落的两个众所周知的特征，物种组成在空间上的更替和物种优势（少数常见物种和许多稀有物种的流行）如何共同决定生物多样性对现实世界尺度上生态系统服务的重要性的研究。为了测量真实世界的复杂性，同时控制真实世界的噪音，研究人员将在1600平方公里的区域内放置实验性的多物种原生植物阵列，作为对野生传粉者群落及其提供的传粉功能进行采样的标准化方法。稀疏模型将用于确定对传粉具有重要意义的传粉媒介物种的数量如何随空间尺度的增加而变化，零模型将用于去除相对于物种更替的优势效应，从而量化优势效应。

Ecosystem services, or the benefits that nature delivers to people, include many functions essential to life on earth such as carbon storage, water purification, and pollination. Two decades of ecological experiments and theory have clearly demonstrated that biodiversity plays an important role in ecosystem functioning, such that biological communities containing more species have higher levels of ecosystem function. However, virtually all of this research has been conducted at small scales and under experimentally controlled conditions that may not represent real-world ecosystems. This project will bridge the gap between the extensive knowledge scientists have developed about the biodiversity-ecosystem function relationship at smaller experimental scales, and the largely unknown role of biodiversity in driving ecosystem services at the scale of real-world landscapes. The researchers will study the pollination delivered to native wildflowers by wild insect pollinators, to determine how many pollinator species are required to provide sufficient pollination to all study sites as spatial scale increases from a single plant community to an entire landscape. Specifically, they will test contrasting predictions about how the number of species required to provide adequate ecosystem services in the real world could be either more, or fewer, than that found in experiments. The results of this study will have important applications for the management of ecosystem services as well as for biodiversity conservation.This will be the first study to investigate how two well-known features of communities, turnover in species composition across space, and species dominance (the prevalence of a few common species and many rare ones), jointly determine the importance of biodiversity to ecosystem services at real-world scales. In order to measure real-world complexity while simultaneously controlling real-world noise, the researchers will use experimental, multi-species arrays of native plants placed throughout a 1600 km2 area as a standardized method for sampling wild pollinator communities and the pollination function they provide. Rarefaction models will be used to determine how the number of pollinator species that are important to pollination changes with increasing spatial scale, and null models will be used to remove, and thus quantify, the effect of dominance relative to that of species turnover.