Toward a methodical framework for comprehensively assessing forest multifunctionality

作者：Stefan Trogisch, Andreas Schuldt, Jürgen Bauhus, Juliet A. Blum, Sabine Both, François Buscot, Nadia Castro‐Izaguirre, Douglas Chesters, Walter Durka, David Eichenberg, Alexandra Erfmeier, Markus Fischer, Christian Geißler, Markus S. Germany, Philipp Goebes, Jessica Gutknecht, Christoph Hahn, Sylvia Haider, Werner Härdtle, Jin He, Andy Hector, Lydia Hönig, Yuanyuan Huang, Alexandra‐Maria Klein, Peter Kühn, Matthias Kunz, Katrin N. Leppert, Ying Li, Xiaojuan Liu, Pascal A. Niklaus, Zhiqin Pei, Katherina A. Pietsch, Ricarda Prinz, Tobias Proß, Michael Scherer‐Lorenzen, Karsten Schmidt, Thomas Scholten, Steffen Seitz, Zhengshan Song, Michael Staab, Goddert von Oheimb, Christina Weißbecker, Erik Welk, Christian Wirth, Tesfaye Wubet, Bo Yang, Xuefei Yang, Chao‐Dong Zhu, Bernhard Schmid, Keping Ma, Helge Bruelheide · 发表于：Ecology and Evolution · 年份：2017 · DOI：10.1002/ece3.3488 · 被引用次数：56 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Species Distribution and Climate Change、Forest Management and Policy

Biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) research has extended its scope from communities that are short-lived or reshape their structure annually to structurally complex forest ecosystems. The establishment of tree diversity experiments poses specific methodological challenges for assessing the multiple functions provided by forest ecosystems. In particular, methodological inconsistencies and nonstandardized protocols impede the analysis of multifunctionality within, and comparability across the increasing number of tree diversity experiments. By providing an overview on key methods currently applied in one of the largest forest biodiversity experiments, we show how methods differing in scale and simplicity can be combined to retrieve consistent data allowing novel insights into forest ecosystem functioning. Furthermore, we discuss and develop recommendations for the integration and transferability of diverse methodical approaches to present and future forest biodiversity experiments. We identified four principles that should guide basic decisions concerning method selection for tree diversity experiments and forest BEF research: (1) method selection should be directed toward maximizing data density to increase the number of measured variables in each plot. (2) Methods should cover all relevant scales of the experiment to consider scale dependencies of biodiversity effects. (3) The same variable should be evaluated with the same method across space and time for adequate larg...