Biodiversitet och skogens multipla ekosystemtjänster
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SammanfattningThis work builds on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning that has been well established by several small-scale experiments over the last twenty years. For the first time, we expand this framework to a regional scale, to examine how biodiversity is related to multiple ecosystem services and functions of great economic importance to society across 400,000 km2 of production forest. It also examines the relationships between ecosystem services and functions, and addresses whether there are synergies or trade-offs between services. Based on nation-wide forest inventory data, we show that tree diversity had a positive or positive hump-shaped relationship to the six measured ecosystem services and functions. The effects were often large; for example, wood production was approximately 50%, and soil carbon storage 14%, higher with five tree species than with one species. Different tree species had different effects on the services and functions, so no single tree species could provide all of them. A diversity of tree species is thus required to provide multiple services and functions simultaneously across a forest landscape. These results are, to the best of our knowledge, the first evidence of such multifunctional complementarity among functionally similar species over large scalesMajor strengths of the study are that, for the first time, multiple ecosystem services have been analyzed together, rather than separately for each service or function, and that we have examined natural production ecosystems rather than small-scale experiments or models. We accounted for environmental conditions such as forest stand age, and soil and climate variables, which are likely to influence the provision of ecosystem services independently of tree diversity. Taken together, our results are highly novel and of large importance for policy, management of production ecosystems, conservation biology, and ecology.
