Evolutionary diversity impacts tropical forest biomass and productivity through disturbance‐mediated ecological pathways

作者：Érica Rievrs Borges, Maxime Réjou‐Méchain, Sylvie Gourlet‐Fleury, Grégoire Vincent, Frédéric Mortier, Xaxier Bry, Guillaume Cornu, Fidèle Baya, Félix Allah‐Barem, Raphaël Pélissier · 发表于：Journal of Ecology · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1111/1365-2745.14399 · 被引用次数：9 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Plant and animal studies、Wildlife Ecology and Conservation

Abstract Significant research efforts have been made to uncover links between biodiversity and biomass productivity in forest ecosystems. However, the causal link between these two ecosystem components, and the underlying mediation role of disturbance, are yet poorly understood for hyper‐diverse tropical forests, because multiple ecological mechanisms are sequentially or simultaneously in play, leading to contradictory results in observational studies. Here, we introduce a novel framework for inferring the expected effects of evolutionary diversity on biomass stocks and productivity within forest ecosystems using observational field data. This framework involves an analytical decomposition of stand biomass into three key components: the number of trees, the mean size of trees and the mean wood density. Through this approach, we can distinguish structure‐ and compositional‐based diversity effects, which likely have distinct ecological origins. We tested this framework in one of the oldest tropical forest experiments, where different levels of silvicultural disturbances were applied in the 1980s, with regular monitoring since then. Our results revealed that disturbance history mediates the effect of evolutionary diversity on forest biomass dynamics and that several Biodiversity Ecosystem Function (BEF) relationships may be hidden behind the composite biomass variable. We specifically found an overall significant negative relationship between evolutionary diversity and biomass p...