Biodiversity is the basis for many fundamental ecological services. The anthropogenic-driven decline of global biodiversity is accelerating, raising concerns about the reduction and unsustainable of ecosystem service following biodiversity losses.
Complementarity in resource use among different plant species is one of the mechanisms driving the positive relationship between biodiversity and productivity. However, the intra-specific variation in plant resource use in response to biodiversity is generally overlooked.
Scientists from Institute of Applied Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, examined the nutrient status of green and senesced leaves of four dominant plant species living in communities with different plant species richness. Further, they calculated nutrient resorption for each species, an index of nutrient conservation.
They found that plants in higher-diversity communities could re-translocate more nutrients from senescing leaves to living organs, which may facilitate the reproduction and vegetative regrowth in the next year.
This conservative nutrient-use strategy may contribute to the positive relationship between biodiversity and productivity, and at the same time, may help buffer plants against variability in soil nutrient availability and make the population more stable over time.
Their findings entitled "Species richness mediates within‐species nutrient resorption: Implications for the biodiversity–productivity relationship" were published in Journal of Ecology recently.
Fig. 1. Changes of plant nutrient concentration with the increasing species richness in plant communities (Image by LV Xiaotao)
Researchers from the Wuhan Botanical Garden selected 30 higher-order rivers for soil, sediment, and water sampling along a latitudinal gradient in eastern China to calculate EMF using 18 variables related to nitrogen cycling, nutrient pool, plant productivity, and water quality. Meanwhile, the microbial diversity and co-occurrence network were also analyzed.
In a recent study, researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) and Harvard University investigated the effects of resource and structural heterogeneity on the biodiversity of nut-nesting ants in rainforest and rubber plantation in Xishuangbanna. They found that limited resource diversity was the main cause of biodiversity loss in nut-nesting ants following the conversion of rainforest to rubber plantation.
86-10-68597521 (day)
86-10-68597289 (night)
86-10-68511095 (day)
86-10-68512458 (night)
cas_en@cas.cn
52 Sanlihe Rd., Xicheng District,
Beijing, China (100864)
Copyright © 2002 - Chinese Academy of Sciences
