Bugs in the analysis of biodiversity experiments : species richness and composition are of similar importance for grassland productivity

Andy Hector, Thomas Bell, Yann Hautier, Forest Isbell, Marc Kéry, Peter B. Reich, Jasper van Ruijven, Bernhard Schmid

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticle

    63 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    The idea that species diversity can influence ecosystem functioning has been controversial and its importance relative to compositional effects hotly debated. Unfortunately, assessing the relative importance of different explanatory variables in complex linear models is not simple. In this paper we assess the relative importance of species richness and species composition in a multilevel model analysis of net aboveground biomass production in grassland biodiversity experiments by estimating variance components for all explanatory variables. We compare the variance components using a recently introduced graphical Bayesian ANOVA. We show that while the use of test statistics and the R2 gives contradictory assessments, the variance components analysis reveals that species richness and composition are of roughly similar importance for primary productivity in grassland biodiversity experiments.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article numbere17434
    Number of pages10
    JournalPLoS One
    Volume6
    Issue number3
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2011

    Open Access - Access Right Statement

    © 2011 Hector et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

    Keywords

    • composition
    • ecosystems
    • grassland
    • species
    • species richness

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