New method to analyse the relationship between biodiversity within and between ecosystems and the multifunction­ality of entire landscapes

Ecosystems fulfil a number of vital tasks: They store carbon, clean polluted water, pollinate plants and so on. How well an ecosystem can fulfil these tasks depends largely on its biodiversity, i.e. the variety of plants, animals and microorganisms that live in it. Until now, scientists have only been able to understand the exact nature of this relationship at a local level, for example in relation to individual forest areas, meadows and ponds. In cooperation with the renowned statistician and mathematician Anne Chao and her team from the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan the DFG research group BETA-FOR has now succeeded in developing a statistical method that for the first time can also analyse the contributions of biodiversity between local ecosystems to the multifunctionality of entire landscapes.

The new statistical method relates the different biodiversity between individual ecosystems in a landscape to the overall multifunctionality. The term "multifunctionality" refers to the bundle of all functions that an ecosystem performs simultaneously. It breaks down the multifunctionality of a landscape into two components - the functions at the local level and those between different ecosystems in a landscape. This way, multifunctionality can be related to local biodiversity and to the biodiversity created by the diversity of habitats. The new tool is available as a R Package called MF.beta4.

Source: partly press release of the JMU Würzburg

https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/new-insights-into-ecosystem-functions/

Publication:

Chao, A.; Chiu, C.H.; Hu, K.-H.; van der Plas, F.; Cadotte, M.; Mitesser, O.; Thorn, S.; Mori, A.; Scherer-Lorenzen, M.; Eisenhauer, N.; Bässler, C.; Delory, B.; Feldhaar, H.; Fichtner, A.; Hothorn, T.; Peters, M.; Pierick, K.; von Oheimb, G.; Müller, J. (2024): Hill-Chao numbers allow decomposing gamma-multifunctionality into alpha and beta components. Ecology Letters. DOI: 10.1111/ele.14336