Biodiversity and Plant Litter: Experimental Evidence Which Does Not Support the View That Enhanced Species Richness Improves Ecosystem Function

作者：David A. Wardle, Karen I. Bonner, K. S. Nicholson · 发表于：Oikos · 年份：1997 · DOI：10.2307/3546010 · 被引用次数：716 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Plant and animal studies、Land Use and Ecosystem Services

There has been a rapidly increasing recent interest in the effects of biological diversity on ecosystem properties, and while some studies have recently concluded that biodiversity improves ecosystem function, these views are based almost entirely on experiments in which species richness of live plants has been varied over all the species diversity treatments. However, most net ecosystem primary productivity eventually enters the decomposition subsystem as plant litter where it has important afterlife effects. Weconducted a field experiment in which litter from 32 plant species (i.e. effects. We conducted a field experiment in which litter from 32 plant species (i.e. eight species of each of four plant functional groups with contrasting litter quality) was collected and placed into litter-bags so that each litter-bag contained between one and eight species; the species which were included in the multiple (>2) species litter-bags were randomly selected. This litter diversity gradient was created within each functional group and across some functional groups. We found large non-additive effects of mixing litter from different species on litter decomposition rates, litter nitrogen contents, rates of nitrogen release from litter and the active microbial biomass present on the litter. The patterns and directions of these non-additive effects were dependent upon both plant functional group and time of harvest, and these effects could be predicted in some instances by the initial li...