Erika S. Zavaleta

Consequences of changing biodiversity

Human alteration of the global environment has triggered the sixth major extinction event in the history of life and caused widespread changes in the global distribution of organisms. These changes in biodiversity alter ecosystem processes and change the resilience of ecosystems to environmental change. This has profound consequences for services that humans derive from ecosystems. The large ecological and societal consequences of changing biodiversity should be minimized to preserve options for future solutions to global environmental problems.

Viewing invasive species removal in a whole-ecosystem context

Eradications of invasive species often have striking positive effects on native biota. However, recent research has shown that species removal in isolation can also result in unexpected changes to other ecosystem components. These secondary effects will become more likely as numbers of interacting invaders increase in ecosystems, and as exotics in late stages of invasion eliminate native species and replace their functional roles. Food web and functional role frameworks can be used to identify ecological conditions that forecast the potential for unwanted secondary impacts. Integration of eradication into a holistic process of assessment and restoration will help safeguard against accidental, adverse effects on native ecosystems.

High plant diversity is needed to maintain ecosystem services

Biodiversity is rapidly declining worldwide, and there is consensus that this can decrease ecosystem functioning and services. It remains unclear, though, whether few or many of the species in an ecosystem are needed to sustain the provisioning of ecosystem services. It has been hypothesized that most species would promote ecosystem services if many times, places, functions and environmental changes were considered; however, no previous study has considered all of these factors together. Here we show that 84% of the 147 grassland plant species studied in 17 biodiversity experiments promoted ecosystem functioning at least once. Different species promoted ecosystem functioning during different years, at different places, for different functions and under different environmental change scenarios. Furthermore, the species needed to provide one function during multiple years were not the same as those needed to provide multiple functions within one year. Our results indicate that even more species will be needed to maintain ecosystem functioning and services than previously suggested by studies that have either (1) considered only the number of species needed to promote one function under one set of environmental conditions, or (2) separately considered the importance of biodiversity for providing ecosystem functioning across multiple years, places, functions or environmental change scenarios. Therefore, although species may appear functionally redundant when one function is considered under one set of environmental conditions, many species are needed to maintain multiple functions at multiple times and places in a changing world.

The Functions of Biological Diversity in an Age of Extinction

Environmental Determinism? Earths millions of species influence a wide range of environmental processes, including elemental cycling, the stability of ecosystems, and the goods and services they provide. Naeem et al. (p. 1401) review recent advances in the young and evolving field of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, explore the extent to which the field is becoming a predictive science, and indicate how the field needs to develop in order to aid worldwide efforts to achieve environmental sustainability in the face of rising rates of extinction. Ecosystems worldwide are rapidly losing taxonomic, phylogenetic, genetic, and functional diversity as a result of human appropriation of natural resources, modification of habitats and climate, and the spread of pathogenic, exotic, and domestic plants and animals. Twenty years of intense theoretical and empirical research have shown that such biotic impoverishment can markedly alter the biogeochemical and dynamic properties of ecosystems, but frontiers remain in linking this research to the complexity of wild nature, and in applying it to pressing environmental issues such as food, water, energy, and biosecurity. The question before us is whether these advances can take us beyond merely invoking the precautionary principle of conserving biodiversity to a predictive science that informs practical and specific solutions to mitigate and adapt to its loss.

Restoration through reassembly: plant traits and invasion resistance

One of the greatest challenges for ecological restoration is to create or reassemble plant communities that are resistant to invasion by exotic species. We examine how concepts pertaining to the assembly of plant communities can be used to strengthen resistance to invasion in restored communities. Community ecology theory predicts that an invasive species will be unlikely to establish if there is a species with similar traits present in the resident community or if available niches are filled. Therefore, successful restoration efforts should select native species with traits similar to likely invaders and include a diversity of functional traits. The success of trait-based approaches to restoration will depend largely on the diversity of invaders, on the strength of environmental factors and on dispersal dynamics of invasive and native species.

Severity of the Effects of Invasive Rats on Seabirds : A Global Review

Invasive rats are some of the largest contributors to seabird extinction and endangerment worldwide. We conducted a meta-analysis of studies on seabird-rat interactions to examine which seabird phylogenetic, morphological, behavioral, and life history characteristics affect their susceptibility to invasive rats and to identify which rat species have had the largest impact on seabird mortality. We examined 94 manuscripts that demonstrated rat effects on seabirds. All studies combined resulted in 115 independent rat-seabird interactions on 61 islands or island chains with 75 species of seabirds in 10 families affected. Seabirds in the family Hydrobatidae and other small, burrow-nesting seabirds were most affected by invasive rats. Laridae and other large, ground-nesting seabirds were the least vulnerable to rats. Of the 3 species of invasive rats, Rattus rattus had the largest mean impact on seabirds followed by R. norvegicus and R. exulans; nevertheless, these differences were not statistically significant. Our findings should help managers and conservation practitioners prioritize selection of islands for rat eradication based on seabird life history traits, develop testable hypotheses for seabird response to rat eradication, provide justification for rat eradication campaigns, and identify suitable levels of response and prevention measures to rat invasion. Assessment of the effects of rats on seabirds can be improved by data derived from additional experimental studies, with emphasis on understudied seabird families such as Sulidae, Phalacrocoracidae, Spheniscidae, Fregatidae, Pelecanoididae, Phaethontidae, and Diomedeidae and evaluation of rat impacts in tropical regions.

GRASSLAND RESPONSES TO THREE YEARS OF ELEVATED TEMPERATURE, CO2, PRECIPITATION, AND N DEPOSITION

Global climate and atmospheric changes may interact in their effects on the diversity and composition of natural communities. We followed responses of an annual grassland to three years of all possible combinations of experimentally elevated CO 2 (1300 mL/L), warming (180 W/m 2 , 1;18C), nitrogen deposition (17 g N·m 22 ·yr 21 ), and precip- itation (150%). Responses of the 10 most common plant species to global changes and to interannual variability were weak but sufficiently consistent within functional groups to drive clearer responses at the functional group level. The dominant functional groups (annual grasses and forbs) showed distinct production and abundance responses to individual global changes. After three years, N deposition suppressed plant diversity, forb production, and forb abundance in association with enhanced grass production. Elevated precipitation en- hanced plant diversity, forb production, and forb abundance but affected grasses little. Warming increased forb production and abundance but did not strongly affect diversity or grass response. Elevated CO2 reduced diversity with little effect on relative abundance or production of forbs and grasses. Realistic combinations of global changes had small di- versity effects but more marked effects on the relative dominance of forbs and grasses. The largest change in relative functional group abundance (150% forbs) occurred under the combination of elevated CO2 1 warming 1 precipitation, which will likely affect much of California in the future. Strong interannual variability in diversity, individual species abundances, and functional group abundances indicated that in our system, (1) responses after three years were not constrained by lags in community response, (2) individual species were more sensitive to interannual variability and extremes than to mean changes in en- vironmental and resource conditions, and (3) simulated global changes interacted with interannual variability to produce responses of varying magnitude and even direction among years. Relative abundance of forbs, the most speciose group in the community, ranged after three years from .30% under elevated CO2 1 warming 1 precipitation to ,12% under N deposition. While opposing production responses at the ecosystem level by different func- tional groups may buffer responses such as net primary production (NPP) change, these shifts in relative dominance could influence ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling and NPP via differences between grasses and forbs in tissue chemistry, allocation, phe- nology, and productivity.

The economic value of controlling an invasive shrub.

Abstract Recent interest in the valuation of ecosystem services has provided tools for assessing the costs of invasive species in natural areas. This study evaluates the economic impacts of tamarisk (Tamarix sp.), an invasive woody shrub, on societally-valued ecosystem services in its naturalized range. Tamarisk, intentionally introduced from Eurasia, has invaded most riparian areas of the arid and semiarid western United States. In its naturalized range, tamarisk consumes more water than native vegetation, with significant economic implications in a region marked by water scarcity. Tamarisk also increases sedimentation in river channels, leading to increased frequency and severity of flood damage. Conservative economic estimates of these impacts indicate that the annual costs of tamarisk to the western United States total USD 280–450 ha−1. Eradicating the invader and restoring native riparian communities throughout the region would cost approximately USD 7400 ha−1. Full recovery of these costs, even with a highly conservative benefits estimate, would occur in as few as 17 years, after which the societal, ecological, and economic benefits of restoration would continue to accrue indefinitely.

Sustaining multiple ecosystem functions in grassland communities requires higher biodiversity.

Society places value on the multiple functions of ecosystems from soil fertility to erosion control to wildlife-carrying capacity, and these functions are potentially threatened by ongoing biodiversity losses. Recent empirically based models using individual species’ traits suggest that higher species richness is required to provide multiple ecosystem functions. However, no study to date has analyzed the observed functionality of communities of interacting species over multiple temporal scales to assess the relationship between biodiversity and multifunctionality. We use data from the longest-running biodiversity-functioning field experiment to date to test how species diversity affects the ability of grassland ecosystems to provide threshold levels of up to eight ecosystem functions simultaneously. Across years and every combination of ecosystem functions, minimum-required species richness consistently increases with the number of functions considered. Moreover, tradeoffs between functions and variability among years prevent any one community type from providing high levels of multiple functions, regardless of its diversity. Sustained multifunctionality, therefore, likely requires both higher species richness than single ecosystem functionality and a diversity of species assemblages across the landscape.

Additive effects of simulated climate changes, elevated CO2, and nitrogen deposition on grassland diversity

Biodiversity responses to ongoing climate and atmospheric changes will affect both ecosystem processes and the delivery of ecosystem goods and services. Combined effects of co-occurring global changes on diversity, however, are poorly understood. We examined plant diversity responses in a California annual grassland to manipulations of four global environmental changes, singly and in combination: elevated CO2, warming, precipitation, and nitrogen deposition. After 3 years, elevated CO2 and nitrogen deposition each reduced plant diversity, whereas elevated precipitation increased it and warming had no significant effect. Diversity responses to both single and combined global change treatments were driven overwhelmingly by gains and losses of forb species, which make up most of the native plant diversity in California grasslands. Diversity responses across treatments also showed no consistent relationship to net primary production responses, illustrating that the diversity effects of these environmental changes could not be explained simply by changes in productivity. In two- to four-way combinations, simulated global changes did not interact in any of their effects on diversity. Our results show that climate and atmospheric changes can rapidly alter biological diversity, with combined effects that, at least in some settings, are simple, additive combinations of single-factor effects.