Consumer community structure and ecosystem functioning

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Biodiversity has been shown to affect a wide range of ecosystem functions, but the underlying mechanisms still are debated. Recently, the necessity of a multitrophic perspective has been highlighted to explain biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships. Previous research in grassland biodiversity experiments has shown strong bottom-up effects of plant diversity on trophic and non-trophic interactions, resulting in differences in consumer community structure, interaction frequencies, and ecological network topology. However, the consequences of changing consumer community and network structure for ecosystem functioning have remained unexplored. Plants are embedded in a network of multi-trophic interactions, and these interactions likely are important drivers of ecosystem functions. A multitrophic biodiversity-ecosystem functioning perspective may be particularly important when multiple ecosystem functions are considered. This subproject will synthesize existing data from the Jena Experiment and related platforms to explore how plant diversity-driven changes in consumer community and network structure influences (multiple) ecosystem functions. The proposed subproject consists of three work packages (WPs). In WP1, we relate consumer community structure to ecosystem functioning, using structural equation modelling and building on taxonomic and species interaction data collected across above- and belowground systems within the Jena Experiment. In WP2, we study consequences of changes in consumer community structure for mass and energy fluxes in systems differing in plant diversity. These data and analyses will, for the first time, allow system-wide comparisons across all plots of the Jena Experiment. In addition, these analyses will be used to generalize across different biodiversity experiments worldwide, with respect to above-belowground mass and energy flow. Finally, in WP3, we will study effects of soil and plant community history (DeLT-BEF Experiment in the Main Experiment) and temporal changes in consumer-driven ecosystem functions (Main and Trait-Based Experiment). This subproject will analyze and integrate data from almost all current subprojects allowing to study the effects of changes in multi-trophic community and network structure on multiple ecosystem functions. To our knowledge, this has rarely been done in terrestrial ecosystems, and the Jena Experiment provides a worldwide unique platform of data and scientific collaborations to tackle this task in a biodiversity experiment.