Several empirical challenges remain unresolved in biodiversity-multifunctionality relationships. In particular, it remains unclear whether the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality (EMF) varies with the number of ecosystem functions considered. Here, we used a variety of approaches, including both simulations and empirical datasets, to provide some clarity on this issue and introduce a new analytical approach for understanding how biodiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality are related.
Results/Conclusions
We found that biodiversity-EMF relationships either did not change or deceased as the number of functions included in the estimate of EMF increased. Results from empirical data were qualitatively similar to those obtained from the simulations. We demonstrated that our findings were determined by accounting for the mathematical underpinnings of the EMF metrics considered (i.e., averaging or summing metric). By converting the averaging or summing metrics into a EMF scaling metric, we found that the average biodiversity effect on EMF decreased as the correlation coefficients among ecosystem functions increased, indicating that the single-function redundancy was generally greater than multifunctional redundancy. Our study highlights that biodiversity-EMF relationships change with the number of functions considered, but in a predictable way. Such a result is critical for understanding how to maximize ecosystem EMF through biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management.