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Plant traits alone are poor predictors of ecosystem properties and long-term ecosystem functioning

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 4, pages 1602–1611 (2020)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 16 January 2023

Abstract

Earth is home to over 350,000 vascular plant species that differ in their traits in innumerable ways. A key challenge is to predict how natural or anthropogenically driven changes in the identity, abundance and diversity of co-occurring plant species drive important ecosystem-level properties such as biomass production or carbon storage. Here, we analyse the extent to which 42 different ecosystem properties can be predicted by 41 plant traits in 78 experimentally manipulated grassland plots over 10 years. Despite the unprecedented number of traits analysed, the average percentage of variation in ecosystem properties jointly explained was only moderate (32.6%) within individual years, and even much lower (12.7%) across years. Most other studies linking ecosystem properties to plant traits analysed no more than six traits and, when including only six traits in our analysis, the average percentage of variation explained in across-year levels of ecosystem properties dropped to 4.8%. Furthermore, we found on average only 12.2% overlap in significant predictors among ecosystem properties, indicating that a small set of key traits able to explain multiple ecosystem properties does not exist. Our results therefore suggest that there are specific limits to the extent to which traits per se can predict the long-term functional consequences of biodiversity change, so that data on additional drivers, such as interacting abiotic factors, may be required to improve predictions of ecosystem property levels.

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Fig. 1: Overview of which and how many traits were typically analysed in other ecosystem functioning-related studies.
Fig. 2: The relative importance of different and multiple traits regarding ecosystem properties across years.
Fig. 3: R2 values of models in which only six traits were analysed to explain ecosystem properties across years.
Fig. 4: The average proportion of variation in levels of ecosystem properties across years explained by plant traits increases asymptotically with the number of traits included in the analysis.

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Data availability

The datasets analysed for this study, are available at Figshare: https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Data_and_R_scripts_of_Plant_traits_alone_are_poor_predictors_of_ecosystem_properties_and_long-term_ecosystem_functioning_/12834350.

Code availability

The R scripts used for this study are available at https://github.com/fonsvanderplas/traits-and-ecosystem-properties/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. de Luca, A. Vogel, H. Hillebrand and E. Marquard for their contributions to data collection. The Jena Experiment is funded by the German Science Foundation (no. DFG Oe516/3-1, 3-2, 10-1). We also thank C. Krause and the UFZ administrative and support staff of the High-Performance Computing Cluster EVE, a joint effort of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research and iDiv, for access to EVE.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Fons van der Plas, Thomas Schröder-Georgi.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Systematic Botany and Functional Biodiversity, Life Science, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany

    Fons van der Plas, Thomas Schröder-Georgi, Alexandra Weigelt, Kathryn Barry & Christian Wirth

  2. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

    Alexandra Weigelt, Kathryn Barry, Adriana Alzate, Nico Eisenhauer, Anke Hildebrandt, Christiane Roscher & Christian Wirth

  3. Terrestrial Ecology Research Group, School of Life Sciences Weihenstephan, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Sebastian Meyer & Wolfgang Weisser

  4. Agroécologie, AgroSup Dijon, INRA, Université Bourgogne, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté, Dijon, France

    Romain L. Barnard

  5. ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Nina Buchmann

  6. Department of Experimental Plant Ecology, Institute for Water and Wetland Research, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, the Netherlands

    Hans de Kroon

  7. Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University Jena, Jena, Germany

    Anne Ebeling & Winfried Voigt

  8. Institute of Biology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany

    Nico Eisenhauer

  9. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Christof Engels

  10. Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Markus Fischer

  11. Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany

    Gerd Gleixner, Ernst-Detlef Schulze & Christian Wirth

  12. Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research–UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Anke Hildebrandt

  13. Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Jena, Germany

    Anke Hildebrandt

  14. Geoecology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Eva Koller-France & Yvonne Oelmann

  15. Institute of Geography and Geoecology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Sophia Leimer & Wolfgang Wilcke

  16. Ecotron Européen de Montpellier, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Montferrier-sur-Lez, France

    Alexandru Milcu

  17. Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, CNRS–Université de Montpellier–Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier–EPHE, Montpellier, France

    Alexandru Milcu

  18. Plant Ecology and Nature Conservation group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands

    Liesje Mommer

  19. Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Pascal A. Niklaus

  20. Department of Physiological Diversity, UFZ, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany

    Christiane Roscher

  21. Institute of Landscape Ecology, University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Christoph Scherber

  22. Centre for Biodiversity Monitoring, Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig, Bonn, Germany

    Christoph Scherber

  23. Geobotany, Faculty of Biology, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Michael Scherer-Lorenzen

  24. Centre of Biodiversity and Sustainable Land Use, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Stefan Scheu

  25. J.F. Blumenbach Institute of Zoology and Anthropology, Animal Ecology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Stefan Scheu

  26. Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Bernhard Schmid

  27. Institute of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Bernhard Schmid

  28. Leuphana University Lüneburg, Institute of Ecology, Universitätsallee 1, Lüneburg, Germany

    Vicky Temperton

  29. Agroecology, Dept. of Crop Sciences, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Teja Tscharntke

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Contributions

F.v.d.P., C.W., T.S.-G., A.W. and K.B. conceived the ideas and designed the study. F.v.d.P., T.S.-G., S.M. and A.A. performed analyses. T.S.-G., A.W., K.B., S.M., R.L.B., N.B., H.d.K., A.E., N.E., C.E., M.F., G.G., A.H., E.K.-F., S.L., A.M., L.M., P.A.N., Y.O., C.R., C.S., M.S.-L., S.S., B.S., E.-D.S., V.T., T.T., W.V., W. Weisser, W. Wilcke and C.W. contributed to data collection. F.v.d.P. wrote a first draft of the paper, and all other authors contributed to editing several manuscript versions.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fons van der Plas.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 A PRISMA flowchart of the literature research.

Our literature search yielded 654 publications, of which 476 were screened, and 129 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility. Of these, 100 were eligible and included in our synthesis.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, including Tables 1–3; and Results, including Tables 5 and 6.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data 1

Overview of studies included in the literature review.

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van der Plas, F., Schröder-Georgi, T., Weigelt, A. et al. Plant traits alone are poor predictors of ecosystem properties and long-term ecosystem functioning. Nat Ecol Evol 4, 1602–1611 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01316-9

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