Nat Ecol Evol. 2021 Dec;5(12):1594-1603. doi: 10.1038/s41559-021-01564-3. Epub 2021 Nov 04.

Functional diversity effects on productivity increase with age in a forest biodiversity experiment.

Nature ecology & evolution

Franca J Bongers, Bernhard Schmid, Helge Bruelheide, Frans Bongers, Shan Li, Goddert von Oheimb, Yin Li, Anpeng Cheng, Keping Ma, Xiaojuan Liu

PMID: 34737435 DOI: 10.1038/s41559-021-01564-3

Abstract

Forest restoration increases global forest area and ecosystem services such as primary productivity and carbon storage. How tree species functional composition impacts the provisioning of these services as forests develop is sparsely studied. We used 10-year data from 478 plots with 191,200 trees in a forest biodiversity experiment in subtropical China to assess the relationship between community productivity and community-weighted mean (CWM) or functional diversity (FD) values of 38 functional traits. We found that effects of FD values on productivity became larger than effects of CWM values after 7 years of forest development and that the FD values also became more reliable predictors of productivity than the CWM values. In contrast to CWM, FD values consistently increased productivity across ten different species-pool subsets. Our results imply that to promote productivity in the long term it is imperative for forest restoration projects to plant multispecies communities with large functional diversity.

© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.

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