A new paper extends this question by considering how within-species diversity – including genotypic richness, genetic differences, and trait differences – contribute to functioning. Abbott et al. (2017, Ecology) use a field-based eelgrass system to explore how independent manipulations of genotypic richness and genetic relatedness affected biomass production and invertebrate community richness. They collected 41 unique genotypes of eelgrass (Zostera marina), and used 11 species-relevant loci to determine the relatedness of each genotype pair. The authors also measured 17 traits relevant to performance including "growth rate, nutrient uptake, photosynthetic efficiency, phenolic content, susceptibility to herbivores, and detrital production ".
 |
| Eelgrass meadow. From http://www.centralcoastbiodiversity.org/ eelgrass-bull-zostera-marina.html |
Each of these of these measures are inter-related, but not necessarily in clear, predictable fashions. Genotypes likely differ functionally, but some traits and some genotypes will vary more than others. Genetic distances or relatedness between species similarly may be proxies for trait differences, but this depends on the underlying evolutionary processes. The relationship between any of these measures and functions such as biomass production are no doubt varied and dependent on the mechanism.
The authors established plots with two levels of genotypic richness, either 2 genotypes or 6 genotypes, where genotypes varied among the 41 available. Fully crossed with the genotypic richness treatment was a genetic relatedness treatment: genotypes were either more closely related than a random selection, less closely related, or as closely related as random. At the end of the experiment, above and belowground biomass were collected, and epifaunal invertebrates were collected, and modelled as a component of the biodiversity components.
Because of early die-offs in many plots, planted genotype richness differed from final richness greatly (very few plots had 6 genotypes remaining, for example). For that reason, final diversity measures were used in the models. The relationship between aboveground biomass or belowground biomass and biodiversity were similar: both genotypic richness and genotypic evenness were positively related to total final biomass, but genetic relatedness was negatively correlated. That is, plots with more related genotypes were less productive. Other variables such as trait diversity was not as important, and in fact they did not find any relationship between trait differences and degree of genetic relatedness between genotypes. Since relatedness seemed unrelated to functional similarities, between genotypes, the authors suggested that possibly that reduced biomass among related genotypes is due to self-recognition mechanisms. Most interestingly, the best predictors of invertebrate grazer diversity were opposite - – the best predictor was trait diversity, not genotypic richness or genetic relatedness.
Even in this case, where Abbott et al. were able to separate different diversity components experimentally, it's clear that simplistic predictions as to how they contribute to functioning are insufficient. The contributions of genotypic versus trait diversity were not strongly related. Further, trait diversity performed best on the function for which genotypic diversity performed worst. Understanding what this means is difficult - are the traits relevant for understanding intraspecific interactions (resource usage, etc) so incredibly different from those relevant for interspecific interactions with herbivores? Are the 17 traits too few to capture all differences, or too many irrelevant traits? Do we expect different biodiversity facets have unique independent effects on ecosystem functions, or does the need to consider multiple facets simply mean we have an imperfect understanding of how different facets are related?
The authors established plots with two levels of genotypic richness, either 2 genotypes or 6 genotypes, where genotypes varied among the 41 available. Fully crossed with the genotypic richness treatment was a genetic relatedness treatment: genotypes were either more closely related than a random selection, less closely related, or as closely related as random. At the end of the experiment, above and belowground biomass were collected, and epifaunal invertebrates were collected, and modelled as a component of the biodiversity components.
Because of early die-offs in many plots, planted genotype richness differed from final richness greatly (very few plots had 6 genotypes remaining, for example). For that reason, final diversity measures were used in the models. The relationship between aboveground biomass or belowground biomass and biodiversity were similar: both genotypic richness and genotypic evenness were positively related to total final biomass, but genetic relatedness was negatively correlated. That is, plots with more related genotypes were less productive. Other variables such as trait diversity was not as important, and in fact they did not find any relationship between trait differences and degree of genetic relatedness between genotypes. Since relatedness seemed unrelated to functional similarities, between genotypes, the authors suggested that possibly that reduced biomass among related genotypes is due to self-recognition mechanisms. Most interestingly, the best predictors of invertebrate grazer diversity were opposite - – the best predictor was trait diversity, not genotypic richness or genetic relatedness.
Even in this case, where Abbott et al. were able to separate different diversity components experimentally, it's clear that simplistic predictions as to how they contribute to functioning are insufficient. The contributions of genotypic versus trait diversity were not strongly related. Further, trait diversity performed best on the function for which genotypic diversity performed worst. Understanding what this means is difficult - are the traits relevant for understanding intraspecific interactions (resource usage, etc) so incredibly different from those relevant for interspecific interactions with herbivores? Are the 17 traits too few to capture all differences, or too many irrelevant traits? Do we expect different biodiversity facets have unique independent effects on ecosystem functions, or does the need to consider multiple facets simply mean we have an imperfect understanding of how different facets are related?
No comments:
Post a Comment