Species diversity promotes the delivery of multiple ecosystem functions (multifunctionality). However, the relative functional importance of rare and common species in driving the biodiversity-multifunctionality relationship remains unknown. We studied the relationship between the diversity of rare and common species (according to their local abundances and across nine different trophic groups)...

The production of public goods like amenity value of the landscape, food security, preservation of rural communities and rural lifestyle, by agricultural sector is a subject that has been widely accepted by experts. However, in many policies and political analyses carried out, solely the production of private goods by the agricultural sector is paid attention and the important function of publi...

Experiments suggest that biodiversity enhances the ability of ecosystems to maintain multiple functions, such as carbon storage, productivity, and the buildup of nutrient pools (multifunctionality). However, the relationship between biodiversity and multifunctionality has never been assessed globally in natural ecosystems. We report here on a global empirical study relating plant species richne...

There is considerable evidence that biodiversity promotes multiple ecosystem functions (multifunctionality), thus ensuring the delivery of ecosystem services important for human well-being. However, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are poorly understood, especially in natural ecosystems. We develop a novel approach to partition biodiversity effects on multifunctionality into three me...

the production of public goods like amenity value of the landscape, food security, preservation of rural communities and rural lifestyle, by agricultural sector is a subject that has been widely accepted by experts. however, in many policies and political analyses carried out, solely the production of private goods by the agricultural sector is paid attention and the important function of publi...

Despite the importance of microbial communities for ecosystem services and human welfare, the relationship between microbial diversity and multiple ecosystem functions and services (that is, multifunctionality) at the global scale has yet to be evaluated. Here we use two independent, large-scale databases with contrasting geographic coverage (from 78 global drylands and from 179 locations acros...

Global change, like droughts, can destabilize the carbon sink function of peatlands, either directly or indirectly through changes in plant community composition. While the effects of drought and plant community composition on individual carbon (C) related processes are well understood, their effect on multiple C-related processes simultaneously-multifunctionality-is poorly known. We studied th...

Increasing attention has been paid to the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) because of the rapid increase in species loss. However, over the past 20 years, most BEF studies only focused on the effect of species diversity on one or a few ecosystem functions, and only a few studies focused on ecosystem multifunctionality (i.e., the simultaneous provision of several...

We manipulated soil animal communities in combination with nitrogen fertilization and found that individual grassland ecosystem functions had contrasting responses across the manipulations (1). We therefore cautioned against using a single multifunctionality index that aggregates individual functions to characterize overall ecosystem functioning (1). Byrnes et al. (2) contend that this caution ...

Ecosystem management policies increasingly emphasize provision of multiple, as opposed to single, ecosystem services. Management for such "multifunctionality" has stimulated research into the role that biodiversity plays in providing desired rates of multiple ecosystem processes. Positive effects of biodiversity on indices of multifunctionality are consistently found, primarily because species ...