Long-Term Consequences Difficult to Predict

Dr Fons van der Plas. Photo: Camilo Osorio Suarez In a longitudinal study, an international research team led by Leipzig University has investigated the consequences of changes in plant biodiversity for the functioning of ecosystems. The scientists found that the relationships between plant traits and ecosystem functions change from year to year. This makes predicting the long-term consequences of biodiversity change extremely difficult, they write in "Nature Ecology & Evolution". "We found that - over the longer term - the links between plant traits and ecosystem functions were indeed very weak, as we could only explain about 12 per cent of the variance in ecosystem functioning,' said the paper's lead author, Dr Fons van der Plas from the Institute of Biology at Leipzig University. Together with colleagues from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and other research institutions in Germany and abroad, he found different patterns than in previous studies - which had focused on short-term links between plant traits and ecosystem functions. These had previously assumed much stronger links between plant traits and ecosystem functioning.