Abstract
Biodiversity is declining globally at a rapid rate nowadays as a result of a variety of global changes, and estimating how biodiversity loss affects ecosystem process (e.g., productivity) is critical. However, little is known about the relationship of macrophyte community productivity to trait-based biodiversity nor the comparative strength of trait-based biodiversity relative to species diversity in relation to productivity. Here, we investigated how multifaceted biodiversity indices were related with macrophyte community productivity using the data collected from a survey of 78 macrophyte plots in Liangzi lake, a shallow freshwater lake in China. We found that functional evenness and community-weighted mean traits had close association with community productivity, while species diversity, functional richness and divergence, and functional group richness were not significantly correlated with productivity. The connection between characteristics of dominant species and community productivity depended on the given trait. The significant correlation between community-level photosynthetic traits (Fv/Fm and chlorophyll content) and productivity revealed the importance of taking photosynthetic traits into account when exploring the mechanism behind the biodiversity–productivity relationship. Moreover, our results showed the redundancy and complementarity of the biodiversity indices in predicting community productivity. Overall, our results suggested that both mass ratio hypothesis and niche complementarity hypothesis can operate on community productivity.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Yang Li for helpful comments. This work was financially supported by the Major Science and Technology Program for Water Pollution Control and Treatment (2015ZX07503-005), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31900281) and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019M650634).
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FM, LY, CHL, and DY conceived the ideas and designed study. FM, CZ, and MT contributed to and organized data collection. FM and LY analyzed the data. FM and LY drafted the manuscript with feedback from CHL and HWY.
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Ma, F., Yang, L., Zhang, C. et al. Functional evenness and community-weighted mean traits have strong correlation with macrophyte community productivity. Aquat Sci 84, 2 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-021-00833-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-021-00833-4