2023 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference
March 5-7, 2023 • Cincinnati, OH
5/21/2019 | 3:00 PM - 3:15 PM | UPSCALING BIODIVERSITY EXPERIMENTS TO FUNCTIONING OF RIVERINE CATCHMENTS | 151 ABC
UPSCALING BIODIVERSITY EXPERIMENTS TO FUNCTIONING OF RIVERINE CATCHMENTS
A central problem for understanding the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is how to scale up the results of plot-scale or laboratory experiments to real ecosystems. Here, we investigated the roles of diversity and density of dominant shredding macroinvertebrates on leaf litter decomposition in forested headwater streams, where terrestrial inputs are an essential resource for the food web. In laboratory experiments, we found that increasing shredder richness has as additive effect on leaf litter processing. Thus differences between species are important in determining ecosystem function, and there was little evidence of non-additive interactions that would complicate upscaling. Next, field surveys revealed that coexistence of different shredder species was rare within catchments, despite overlapping regional distributions. This reinforces that species identity rather than richness is important for predicting ecosystem functioning. Returning to the laboratory, we found that per-capita contribution to decomposition declines with increasing density, likely due to interference competition. We conclude by using this laboratory and field data to make upscaled predictions of decomposition in real stream catchments, showing that incorporating spatial heterogeneity in density and density-dependent behavior can drastically alter predictions of ecosystem function.
- Aquatic-terrestrial Linkage
- Invertebrate
- Spatial
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Presenters/Authors
Chelsea J. Little
(), Simon Fraser University, chelsea_little@sfu.ca;
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Florian Altermatt
(), Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, florian.altermatt@eawag.ch;
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