Multiple plant diversity components drive consumer communities across ecosystems.

ABSTRACT: Humans modify ecosystems and biodiversity worldwide, with negative consequences for ecosystem functioning. Promoting plant diversity is increasingly suggested as a mitigation strategy. However, our mechanistic understanding of how plant diversity affects the diversity of heterotrophic consumer communities remains limited. Here, we disentangle the relative importance of key components of plant diversity as drivers of herbivore, predator, and parasitoid species richness in experimental forests and grasslands. We find that plant species richness effects on consumer species richness are consistently positive and mediated by elevated structural and functional diversity of the plant communities. The importance of these diversity components differs across trophic levels and ecosystems, cautioning

SUBMITTER: Schuldt A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6440984 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature