Multitrophic functional diversity predicts ecosystem functioning in experimental assemblages of estuarine consumers
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Ecology, Marine Biology
- Keywords
- biodiversity, functional diversity, ecosystem functioning, consumers, grazers, predators, estuaries
- Copyright
- © 2014 Lefcheck et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Multitrophic functional diversity predicts ecosystem functioning in experimental assemblages of estuarine consumers. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e540v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.540v1
Abstract
The use of functional traits to explain biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning has attracted intense recent interest, yet very few a priori manipulations of functional diversity have been attempted to date, especially from a food web perspective. Here, we simultaneously manipulated multiple functional traits of estuarine grazers and predators within multiple levels of species richness to test whether species richness or functional diversity is a better predictor of ecosystem functioning in multitrophic estuarine food webs. Community functional diversity better predicted the majority of ecosystem responses based on results from generalized linear mixed effects models. Structural equation modeling revealed that this outcome was independently attributable to functional diversity of both trophic levels, with stronger effects observed for predators. Functional complementarity was also important, as species with different combinations of traits influenced different ecosystem functions. Our study is the first to extend experimental investigations of functional diversity to a multilevel food web, and demonstrates that functional diversity is more effective than species richness in predicting ecosystem functioning in a food web context.
Author Comment
This pre-print is hosted for open peer-review concurrently with submission to an ecological journal.