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

生态系统服务，或自然界提供给人类的利益，包括许多对地球上的生命至关重要的功能，如碳储存，水净化和授粉。20年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发挥着重要作用，例如包含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，可能不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现实世界景观尺度上驱动生态系统服务的作用之间的差距。研究人员将研究野生昆虫授粉者为本地野花提供的授粉，以确定随着空间尺度从单一植物群落增加到整个景观，需要多少授粉者物种为所有研究地点提供足够的授粉。具体来说，他们将测试对比预测，即在真实的世界中提供足够的生态系统服务所需的物种数量可能比实验中发现的更多或更少。本研究的结果将对生态系统服务的管理以及生物多样性保护具有重要的应用价值，这将是第一项研究，以调查两个众所周知的社区特征，物种组成在空间上的周转和物种优势（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生态系统服务的重要性。为了测量真实世界的复杂性，同时控制真实世界的噪音，研究人员将使用实验性的、多物种的原生植物阵列，将其放置在1600平方公里的区域内，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。稀疏模型将被用来确定授粉物种的数量是如何随着空间尺度的增加而变化的重要授粉，零模型将被用来删除，从而量化，相对于物种周转的优势的影响。

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.