SG: Synthetic analysis of the importance of species richness to ecosystem services in natural systems

大自然提供的生态系统服务使人类受益：农作物依赖授粉者，沼泽保护海岸免受风暴潮的影响，森林消除大气中的二氧化碳。世界正在迅速丧失生物多样性，了解生物多样性丧失将如何影响生态系统服务对人类福祉至关重要。大多数尝试都是在野外和实验室进行的。提供生态系统服务的自然社区很少看起来像实验。科学家们承认这一点，但一直很难研究生物多样性丧失对真实的世界生态系统服务的影响，这在很大程度上是因为对复杂自然群落的分析存在局限性。在这个项目中，研究人员将使用一种新的方法，克服以前的局限性，分析一些世界上最大的数据集，目的是了解生态系统服务需要自然群落的哪些方面。例如，拥有几个物种的许多个体就足够了吗？或者我们需要许多不同的物种来提供生态系统服务吗？这项研究将通过更好地了解生物多样性如何影响生态系统功能来提供社会效益，这可能与科学政策有关。此外，该项目的数据和编码将向公众提供。关于大规模生态系统服务的驱动力的知识是基本的，人们普遍认为，物种丰富度对自然系统中的生态系统服务是必要的，这更多的是一种假设，而不是一个既定的事实。该项目将使用一种新颖而强大的分析方法，以进化生物学的普莱斯方程为基础，确定生物多样性对多种生态系统服务的重要性。具体而言，价格方程划分为三个附加条款的生态系统服务的差异：丰富度，组成和上下文依赖（其中包括丰度变化以及环境因素）。PI将汇编最大和最完整的公开数据集，并使用它们进行综合分析。研究将确定：（1）丰富度、组成和环境依赖性在产生生态系统服务的平均水平和时间方差方面的相对重要性，（2）空间和时间尺度在生态系统功能中的作用，以及（3）来自世界上最大的生物多样性的数据-该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过评估被认为值得支持使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

Nature provides ecosystem services that benefit humans: crops rely on pollinators, marshes protect coasts from storm surges, and forests remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The world is rapidly losing biodiversity, and understanding how biodiversity loss will affect ecosystem services is important for human well-being. Most attempts to do this have used experiments in the field and laboratory. Natural communities, in which ecosystem services are provided, rarely look like experiments. Scientists acknowledge this, but it has been hard to study the effect of biodiversity loss on ecosystem services in the real world, in large part because of limitations in the analysis of complex natural communities. In this project, the researchers will use a new method that overcomes previous limitations to analyze some of the world's largest data sets, with the goal of understanding what aspects of natural communities are needed for ecosystem services. For example, is it enough to have many individuals of a few species, or do we need many different species to provide ecosystem services? This research will provide society benefits through a better understanding of how biodiversity influences ecosystem function, which could have relevance for science policy. Additionally, data and coding from the project will be made available to the public. Knowledge of what drives ecosystem services at large scales is rudimentary, and the widespread belief that species richness is necessary for ecosystem services in natural systems is more of an assumption than an established fact. This project will use a novel and powerful analytical approach, based on the Price equation from evolutionary biology, to determine the importance of biodiversity to multiple ecosystem services. Specifically, the Price equation partitions differences in ecosystem services into three additive terms: richness, composition, and context dependence (which includes abundance variation as well as environmental factors). The PIs will compile the largest and most complete publicly-available data sets, and use them to conduct a synthetic analysis. The research will determine: (1) the relative importance of richness, composition, and context dependence in producing the mean levels and temporal variance of ecosystem services, (2) the role of spatial and temporal scale in ecosystem functions, and (3) the extent to which data from the worlds' largest biodiversity-function experiments align with results from ecosystems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.