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

生态系统服务，或自然给人类带来的好处，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。二十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，包含更多物种的生物群落具有更高的生态功能水平。然而，几乎所有这些研究都是在小规模和实验控制的条件下进行的，这些条件可能不代表真实世界的生态系统。该项目将弥合科学家在较小的实验规模上发展出的关于生物多样性-生态系统功能关系的广泛知识，以及在现实世界景观规模上生物多样性在推动生态系统服务方面基本上未知的作用之间的差距。研究人员将研究野生昆虫传粉者向本地野花授粉的情况，以确定随着空间尺度从单一植物群落增加到整个景观，需要多少种传粉者才能为所有研究地点提供足够的授粉。具体地说，他们将测试对比预测，即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可能比实验中发现的更多或更少。这项研究的结果将在生态系统服务的管理和生物多样性保护方面具有重要的应用。这将是第一次研究群落的两个众所周知的特征--物种组成的跨空间周转和物种优势度(一些常见物种和许多稀有物种的流行)如何在真实世界尺度上共同决定生物多样性对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，研究人员将使用放置在1600平方公里范围内的本土植物的实验、多物种阵列作为采样野生传粉者群落及其提供的授粉功能的标准化方法。稀疏模型将被用来确定对授粉重要的传粉者物种的数量如何随着空间尺度的增加而变化，而零模型将被用来消除并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.