当前位置： SCI文献检索 > ECOLOGY期刊下所有文献 > A mechanistic basis for underyielding in phytoplankton communities.

A mechanistic basis for underyielding in phytoplankton communities.

Abstract：

:Species richness has been shown to increase biomass production of plant communities. Such overyielding occurs when a community performs better than its component monocultures due to the complementarity or dominance effect and is mostly detected in substrate-bound plant communities (terrestrial plants or submerged macrophytes) where resource use complementarity can be enhanced due to differences in rooting architecture and depth. Here, we investigated whether these findings are generalizeable for free-floating phytoplankton with little potential for spatial differences in resource use. We performed aquatic microcosm experiments with eight phytoplankton species belonging to four functional groups to determine the manner in which species and community biovolume varies in relation to the number of functional groups and hypothesized that an increasing number of functional groups within a community promotes overyielding. Unexpectedly, we did not detect overyielding in any algal community. Instead, total community biovolume tended to decrease with an increasing number of functional groups. This underyielding was mainly caused by the negative dominance effect that originated from a trade-off between growth rate and final biovolume. In monoculture, slow-growing species built up higher biovolumes than fast-growing ones, whereas in mixture a fast-growing but low-productive species monopolized most of the nutrients and prevented competing species from developing high biovolumes expected from monocultures. Our results indicated that the magnitude of the community biovolume was largely determined by the identity of one species. Functional diversity and resource use complementarity were of minor importance among free-floating phytoplankton, possibly reflecting the lack of spatially heterogeneous resource distribution. As a consequence, biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships may not be easily generalizeable from substrate-bound plant to phytoplankton communities and vice versa.

journal_name

Ecology

journal_title

Ecology

authors

Schmidtke A,Gaedke U,Weithoff G

doi

10.1890/08-2370.1

subject

Has Abstract

pub_date

2010-01-01 00:00:00

pages

212-21

issue

eissn

0012-9658

issn

1939-9170

journal_volume

pub_type

杂志文章

在线工具

A mechanistic basis for underyielding in phytoplankton communities.