We cannot be the only ones to have noticed that in the past couple of weeks there has been a spate of papers on different aspects of the link between plant diversity and ecosystem functioning:
- The functional role of producer diversity in ecosystems.
- Does plant diversity benefit agroecosystems? A synthetic review.
- Why intraspecific trait variation matters in community ecology.
- Genotypic richness and dissimilarity opposingly affect ecosystem functioning.
Needless to say, we’re working our way through that little lot, so you wont have to. More soon. Unless, that is, someone out there wants to do the honours?
Cardinale et al. (2011) The functional role of producer diversity
in ecosystems. American Journal of Botany 98(3): 572–592. 2011.
“When a polyculture yields more mass than even its highest yielding species, researchers in the plant sciences call this transgressive overyielding,”
“Of the 375 resulting observations, LR max.min was greater than zero in just 138 — meaning, there was evidence of transgressive overyielding in just 37% of all observations ( Fig. 2C). The remaining 63% of observations suggest that diverse polycultures yield less biomass than the single highest yielding monoculture.”
“The overall distribution of values for LR max.min was significantly negative with a mean value of e − 0.14 (Table 2 ), which means that producer yield in the most diverse polyculture was, on average, just 0.87 × that of the highest yielding monoculture.”
I need to get my head round this. Are monoculture farmers getting it right?