AI Article Synopsis

  • Global change, particularly intensified land use, impacts human well-being by affecting the provision of various ecosystem services, but the specific role of biodiversity loss in this process is still uncertain.
  • A study on 150 agricultural grasslands revealed that both biodiversity loss and changes in functional composition contributed significantly to ecosystem service changes, with indirect effects being as significant as direct ones.
  • Findings indicate that the impacts of biodiversity loss and functional composition shifts vary depending on land-use goals and regional productivity, highlighting the complexity of managing ecosystems for multiple services.

Article Abstract

Global change, especially land-use intensification, affects human well-being by impacting the delivery of multiple ecosystem services (multifunctionality). However, whether biodiversity loss is a major component of global change effects on multifunctionality in real-world ecosystems, as in experimental ones, remains unclear. Therefore, we assessed biodiversity, functional composition and 14 ecosystem services on 150 agricultural grasslands differing in land-use intensity. We also introduce five multifunctionality measures in which ecosystem services were weighted according to realistic land-use objectives. We found that indirect land-use effects, i.e. those mediated by biodiversity loss and by changes to functional composition, were as strong as direct effects on average. Their strength varied with land-use objectives and regional context. Biodiversity loss explained indirect effects in a region of intermediate productivity and was most damaging when land-use objectives favoured supporting and cultural services. In contrast, functional composition shifts, towards fast-growing plant species, strongly increased provisioning services in more inherently unproductive grasslands.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4744976PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ele.12469DOI Listing

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