Evolutionary history shapes grassland productivity through opposing effects on complementarity and selection

作者：Daniel J. Larkin, Mary‐Claire Glasenhardt, Evelyn W. Williams, Nisa Karimi, Rebecca S. Barak, Emma Leavens, Andrew L. Hipp · 发表于：Ecology · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1002/ecy.4129 · 被引用次数：12 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Plant and animal studies、Genetic diversity and population structure

Phylogenetic diversity (PD), the evolutionary history of the organisms comprising a community, is increasingly recognized as an important driver of ecosystem function. However, biodiversity-ecosystem function experiments have rarely included PD as an a priori treatment. Thus, PD's effects in existing experiments are often confounded by covarying differences in species richness and functional trait diversity (FD). Here we report an experimental demonstration of strong PD effects on grassland primary productivity that are independent of FD, which was separately manipulated, and species richness, which was planted uniformly high to mimic diverse natural grasslands. Partitioning diversity effects demonstrated that higher PD increased complementarity (niche partitioning and/or facilitation) but lowered selection effects (probability of sampling highly productive species). Specifically, for every 5% increase in PD, complementarity increased by 26% on average (±8% SE), while selection effects decreased more modestly (8 ± 16%). PD also shaped productivity through clade-level effects on functional traits, that is, trait values associated with particular plant families. This clade effect was most pronounced in the Asteraceae (sunflower family), which, in tallgrass prairies, generally comprises tall, high-biomass species with low phylogenetic distinctiveness. FD also reduced selection effects but did not alter complementarity. Our results show that PD, independent of richness and FD, me...