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Bottom-up effects of plant diversity on multitrophic interactions in a biodiversity experiment

Abstract

Biodiversity is rapidly declining1, and this may negatively affect ecosystem processes2, including economically important ecosystem services3. Previous studies have shown that biodiversity has positive effects on organisms and processes4 across trophic levels5. However, only a few studies have so far incorporated an explicit food-web perspective6. In an eight-year biodiversity experiment, we studied an unprecedented range of above- and below-ground organisms and multitrophic interactions. A multitrophic data set originating from a single long-term experiment allows mechanistic insights that would not be gained from meta-analysis of different experiments. Here we show that plant diversity effects dampen with increasing trophic level and degree of omnivory. This was true both for abundance and species richness of organisms. Furthermore, we present comprehensive above-ground/below-ground biodiversity food webs. Both above ground and below ground, herbivores responded more strongly to changes in plant diversity than did carnivores or omnivores. Density and richness of carnivorous taxa was independent of vegetation structure. Below-ground responses to plant diversity were consistently weaker than above-ground responses. Responses to increasing plant diversity were generally positive, but were negative for biological invasion, pathogen infestation and hyperparasitism. Our results suggest that plant diversity has strong bottom-up effects on multitrophic interaction networks, with particularly strong effects on lower trophic levels. Effects on higher trophic levels are indirectly mediated through bottom-up trophic cascades.

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Figure 1: Effects of plant species richness on above- and below-ground organisms in temperate grassland.
Figure 2: Dampening of plant species richness effects with increasing trophic level.
Figure 3: Food web of above- and below-ground biodiversity.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. M. Tylianakis, P. Batáry, Y. Clough, M. J. Crawley, J. Fox, J. Fründ, D. Gladbach and A. Hector for comments that improved this manuscript. The gardeners, technicians, student helpers and managers of the Jena Experiment are acknowledged for their assistance. This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (FOR 456).

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Authors

Contributions

C.S., C.M. and J.S. assembled all data. N.E. contributed data for the below-ground food webs. C.S. performed all analyses and wrote the manuscript. C.S. and T.T. are the principal authors, N.E. to A.W. are listed in descending order of the importance of their contributions, and the remaining authors contributed equally. All authors contributed their own data sets, discussed the analysis and results, and commented on the manuscript text.

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Correspondence to Christoph Scherber.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Figures 1-3 with legends, Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Tables 1-2, and 4-10 (see separate file for Table 3) and additional references. (PDF 5087 kb)

Supplementary Table 3

This file contains a long text file containing output (parameter estimates) from all models fitted during the model selection process. (PDF 3479 kb)

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Scherber, C., Eisenhauer, N., Weisser, W. et al. Bottom-up effects of plant diversity on multitrophic interactions in a biodiversity experiment. Nature 468, 553–556 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09492

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