Evenness effect on ecosystem functioning

Most biodiversity ecosystem function (BEF) experiment focus on one aspect of diversity: species richness, and had to it some functional composition flavour. The treatment manipulate the number of species and the number of broad functional group occurring. The issue there is that diversity is not only species richness, the classical definition of diversity tells us that it is the combination between richness and evenness that makes diversity (Tuomitso 2012). Diversity is therefore the number of biological unit present at a given location at a given time taking into account how are the individuals distributed amongst the species.

Some definition:

A community with 10 species where 99% of individuals belong to one species is thought to be less diverse than a community with 10 species and equal repartition of the individuals between the species. The difference in the distribution of the total abundance between the different species in a community is called evenness. A community where all species have the same abundance will get the highest possible evenness value while a community where most of the individual belong to one species will have the lowest evenness value. There is a whole bunch of index that can be used to represent these three different components: species richness, evenness and diversity, people interested by knowing how to measure these should read Magurran and McGill 2011.

Here in this post I will talk about the ways by which a community of changing evenness will affect its ecosystem function.

The early literature on BEF already highlighted the potential impacts of changing evenness on the function of the ecosystem (Chapin et al 2000), as changes in the evenness will impact the distribution of the functional traits values (see figure 1 in Hillebrand et al 2008).

A community evenness will shift much earlier than its species richness, before a species is loss its abundance is likely to decline gradually leading to variation in evenness if this decline is not uniformly affecting all species in the system (ie if all species loose 5 individuals between time 1 and time 2, evenness will be unchanged). Tracking community evenness gives us some kind of early warning signals of what is going on in the community.

We can make three different scenarios on how changes in evenness will affect ecosystem function:

• if the function comes from synergies between the species in the community (ie complementarity, mutualism …) a reduction in evenness would lead to decline in the function rates as the beneficial supports between the species declines.

• if the function rates is dominated by the output of one species (ie one dominant species) and this species performance for the focal function is below the average, then a decrease in evenness due to the increased dominance of this species will lead to decreasing function rates

• if the function rates is dominated by the output of one species performing above average (a superproductive species), then the decrease in evenness caused by the increased dominance of this species will lead to an increase in the function.

Empirical results of the relation of evenness and ecosystem function are still rather rare, Wilsey and Potvin (2000) found in a grassland system that in plots with higher evenness there were higher variation in the light-capturing strategies used by the plant and so higher biomass production.

Evenness and dominance are two closely linked concept that often correlates between one another, Hillebrand et al (2008) reviewed some of the literature investigating links between evenness or dominance and ecosystem function, all kind of relation have already been found ie negative, positive or no relation.

So evenness effect on ecosystem function may take different form and will be sensible to spatial and time scale under study but knowledge on these relations will help us predict how the ecosystem functions will respond to the continuous shifts in the abundance of the species under anthropogenic pressures.

Litterature:

Chapin III, F. Stuart, et al. “Consequences of changing biodiversity.” Nature 405.6783 (2000): 234-242.

Hillebrand, Helmut, Danuta M. Bennett, and Marc W. Cadotte. “Consequences of dominance: a review of evenness effects on local and regional ecosystem processes.” Ecology 89.6 (2008): 1510-1520.

Magurran, Anne E., and Brian J. McGill, eds. Biological diversity: frontiers in measurement and assessment. Vol. 12. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Tuomisto, Hanna. “An updated consumer’s guide to evenness and related indices.” Oikos 121.8 (2012): 1203-1218.

Wilsey, Brian J., and Catherine Potvin. “Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: importance of species evenness in an old field.” Ecology 81.4 (2000): 887-892.