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

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 5, pages 1594–1603 (2021)Cite this article

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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.

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Fig. 1: Overview of the research method and hypotheses.
Fig. 2: CWM and FD effects on accumulated stand volume during 10 years of increasing stand age.
Fig. 3: The reliability of CWM and FD values to predict accumulated stand volume during 10 years of increasing stand age.
Fig. 4: Effects of CWM and FD values of 38 traits on accumulated stand volume after 10 years for ten different species-pool subsets.

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Data availability

The stand-level tree volume data supporting the findings of this study are available at https://data.botanik.uni-halle.de/bef-china/datasets/640. The species trait data supporting the findings of this study are available at https://data.botanik.uni-halle.de/bef-china/datasets/645.

Code availability

The R code used to create the metadata and perform analyses is available at https://github.com/fjbongers/FD-effects-with-stand-age.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB31000000), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFA0605103), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31870409) and CAS Interdisciplinary Innovation Team (JCTD-2018-06). X.L. was supported by the Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS (2019082). F.J.B. was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences President’s International Fellowship Initiative. H.B. and G.v.O. gratefully acknowledge the funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation (319936945/GRK2324)). B.S. was supported by the University Research Priority Program Global Change and Biodiversity of the University of Zurich. We thank a large number of workers for the tree measurements and maintenance of the experimental sites.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Franca J. Bongers, Shan Li, Anpeng Cheng, Keping Ma & Xiaojuan Liu

  2. Department of Geography, Remote Sensing Laboratories, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Bernhard Schmid

  3. Institute of Biology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany

    Helge Bruelheide

  4. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

    Helge Bruelheide & Goddert von Oheimb

  5. Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands

    Frans Bongers

  6. Institute of General Ecology and Environmental Protection, Technische Universität Dresden, Tharandt, Germany

    Goddert von Oheimb

  7. Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Monitoring and Sustainable Management and Utilization, Sanming University, Sanming, China

    Yin Li

  8. College of Life Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Anpeng Cheng & Keping Ma

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  1. Franca J. Bongers
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  2. Bernhard Schmid
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  4. Frans Bongers
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  9. Keping Ma
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  10. Xiaojuan Liu
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Contributions

X.L. and K.M. conceived the study. S.L., G.v.O., Y.L. and A.C. were responsible for data collection. F.J.B. performed the analyses with contributions from B.S., H.B., F.B. and X.L. The initial manuscript was prepared by F.J.B., X.L. and B.S. All authors helped improve the readability of the text.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Keping Ma or Xiaojuan Liu.

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Bongers, F.J., Schmid, B., Bruelheide, H. et al. Functional diversity effects on productivity increase with age in a forest biodiversity experiment. Nat Ecol Evol 5, 1594–1603 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01564-3

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