Discontinuity in the responses of ecosystem processes and multifunctionality to altered soil community composition.

ABSTRACT: Ecosystem management policies increasingly emphasize provision of multiple, as opposed to single, ecosystem services. Management for such "multifunctionality" has stimulated research into the role that biodiversity plays in providing desired rates of multiple ecosystem processes. Positive effects of biodiversity on indices of multifunctionality are consistently found, primarily because species that are redundant for one ecosystem process under a given set of environmental conditions play a distinct role under different conditions or in the provision of another ecosystem process. Here we show that the positive effects of diversity (specifically community composition) on multifunctionality indices can also arise from a statistical fallacy analogous to Simpson's paradox (where aggregating dat

SUBMITTER: Bradford MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4210050 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature