Bradley J. Cardinale, Diane S. Srivastava, J. Emmett Duffy, Justin P. Wright, Amy L. Downing, Mahesh Sankaran, Claire Jouseau, Marc W. Cadotte, Ian T. Carroll, Jerome J. Weis, Andy Hector, and Michel Loreau. 2009. Effects of biodiversity on the functioning of ecosystems: A summary of 164 experimental manipulations of species richness. Ecology 90:854.

Data Paper

Ecological Archives E090-060-D1.

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Authors
Data Files
Abstract
Metadata

Author(s)

Bradley J. Cardinale
Department of Ecology, Evolution & Marine Biology
University of California – Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA
E-mail: [email protected]

Diane S. Srivastava
Department of Zoology
University of British Columbia,Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada

J. Emmett Duffy
Virginia Institute of Marine Science
The College of William and Mary
Gloucester Point, Virginia 23062 USA

Justin P. Wright
Department of Biology
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708 USA

Amy L. Downing
Department of Zoology
Ohio Wesleyan University
Delaware, Ohio 43015 USA

Mahesh Sankaran
Institute of Integrative & Comparative Biology
Faculty of Biological Sciences
University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT UK

Claire Jouseau
Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology
Columbia University, New York, New York 10027 USA

Marc W. Cadotte
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
University of California - Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93101 USA

Ian T. Carroll
Department of Ecology, Evolution & Marine Biology
University of California – Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA

Jerome J. Weis
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511 USA

Andy Hector
Institute of Environmental Sciences
Universität Zürich
Zürich, Switzerland

Michel Loreau
Department of Biology
McGill University, Montreal, QC, H3A 1B1 Canada

Data Files

BEF_summary_v2_Aug2008.csv -- File is 545 records, not including header row, and is formatted as a comma separated values. No compression scheme was used. Cells noted with "." indicate that the information is not relevant, not reported, or not available from the study. Cells that are blank mean that the information has yet to be collected (i.e., the data may or may not exist).

Abstract

Over the past decade, accelerating rates of species extinction have prompted an increasing number of studies to reduce the number of species experimentally in a variety of ecosystems and examine how this aspect of diversity alters the efficiency by which communities capture biologically essential resources and convert them into new tissue. Here we summarize the results of 164 experiments (reported in 84 publications) that have manipulated the richness of primary producers, herbivores, detritivores, or predators in a variety of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and examined how this impacts (1) the standing stock abundance or biomass of the focal trophic group, (2) the abundance or biomass of that trophic group's primary resource(s), and/or (3) the extent to which that trophic group depletes its resource(s). Our summary includes studies that have focused on the top-down effects of diversity; whereby researchers have examined how the richness of trophic group t impacts the consumption of a shared resource, and also studies that have focused on the bottom-up effects of diversity, whereby researchers have examined how the richness of trophic group t impacts the consumption of t by the next highest trophic level. The first portion of the data set provides information about the source of data and relevant aspects of the experimental design, including the spatial and temporal scales at which the work was performed. The second portion gives the magnitude of each response variable, the standard deviation, and the level of replication at each level of species richness manipulated. The third portion of the data set summarizes the magnitude of diversity effects in two ways. First, log ratios are used to compare the response variable in the most diverse polyculture to either the mean of all monocultures or the species having the highest/lowest value in monoculture. Second, data from each level of species richness are fit to three nonlinear functions (log, power, and hyperbolic) to assess which best characterizes the shape of diversity effects. The final portion of the data set summarizes any information that helps parse diversity effects into that attributable to species richness vs. that attributable to changes in species composition across levels of richness.

Key words:  biodiversity; ecosystem efficiency; ecosystem functioning; ecosystem services; productivity; species richness; trophic efficiency.

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