Evenness mediates the global relationship between forest productivity and richness

Abstract

1. Biodiversity is an important component of natural ecosystems, with higher species richness often correlating with an increase in ecosystem productivity. Yet, this relationship varies substantially across environments, typically becoming less pronounced at high levels of species richness. However, species richness alone cannot reflect all important properties of a community, including community evenness, which may mediate the relationship between biodiversity and productivity. If the evenness of a community correlates negatively with richness across forests globally, then a

Long‐term effects of intercropping on multi‐trophic structure and bio‐thermodynamic health of mixed Eucalyptus‐native tree plantations

“…Thus, our results showed that the growth of both Eucalyptus and mixed native trees was promoted with an increased intercropping ratio of native trees. Considering the increased evenness of trees with the increased intercropping ratio of native trees (indicated by SWI and PI), our results also confirmed the important effect of evenness on productivity of forests with high species richness (Hordijk et al, 2023).…”

40 years of forest dynamics and tree demography in an intact tropical forest at M’Baïki in central Africa

“…PSPs data has been collated within plot networks at the regional, continental and now global scale 22 , 29 – 31 and combined with other forest inventory plots or unstructured data (like species occurrences) to address global ecological questions and biodiversity issues. Recent studies examined the relationship between forest biodiversity and productivity 32 , 33 , the number of tree species in the tropics 34 and on Earth 35 , invasion by non-native tree species 36 , or the forest carbon potential 37 thanks to new approaches in data analysis like machine learning or artificial intelligence allowing to deal with massive but heterogeneous data.…”

Comment on ‘In complexity we trust: learning from the socialist calculation debate for ecosystem management’

“…And because the effects of introductions cascade through interaction networks, it is often difficult to predict whether they will reinforce or undermine the integrity of a given ecosystem [11,18,19]. Thus, attempting to artificially increase complexity can have unintended consequences [13,20,21] and entail trade-offs with other desirable system features, like resilience, robustness, or productivity [16,[22][23][24].…”