Design principles for multi‐species productive grasslands: Quantifying effects of diversity beyond richness

作者：John A. Finn, Matthias Suter, Rishabh Vishwakarma, Natalie J. Oram, A. Lüscher, Caroline Brophy · 发表于：Journal of Ecology · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1111/1365-2745.14314 · 被引用次数：21 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Agroforestry and silvopastoral systems、Rangeland and Wildlife Management

Abstract Productive grasslands in temperate regions have relied strongly on low plant diversity with high management intensity and fertiliser inputs. Increasing plant diversity can provide high yields of digestible forage for livestock production with lower environmental impacts, and thus represents a diversity‐dependent nature‐based solution that can deliver multiple ecosystem functions. Sharing lessons from the design of managed, productive grassland communities, we address the following questions: how can we identify combinations of plant species that best deliver a selected function or multiple functions? and; when is community composition more important than species richness? We describe approaches that separate plant diversity into its underlying components: species richness, composition and relative abundance. Disentangling these three components facilitates a more nuanced understanding of how diversity can contribute to the design of diversity‐dependent nature‐based solutions.