Benjamin de Haas explains individual differences in eye movement patterns.
New Research In
Physical Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Biological Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Edited by Robin S. Reid, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Ruth S. DeFries January 26, 2019 (received for review April 27, 2018)
Significance
The potential importance of herbivore diversity in maintaining ecosystem functioning remains unclear in terrestrial ecosystems. This is a critical knowledge gap because the global human population increasingly relies on grasslands to supply meat and dairy products. As the global human population continues to grow, and as per capita consumption of meat and dairy products continues to increase, livestock grazing will place unprecedented pressures on grasslands worldwide. We show that diversifying livestock could promote grassland biodiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality in an increasingly managed world, and also provide insights into the importance of multitrophic diversity to maintain ecosystem multifunctionality in managed ecosystems. Grassland grazing management by livestock diversification increases nature’s benefits to people, partly by maintaining a diverse array of grassland species.
Abstract
Increasing plant diversity can increase ecosystem functioning, stability, and services in both natural and managed grasslands, but the effects of herbivore diversity, and especially of livestock diversity, remain underexplored. Given that managed grazing is the most extensive land use worldwide, and that land managers can readily change livestock diversity, we experimentally tested how livestock diversification (sheep, cattle, or both) influenced multidiversity (the diversity of plants, insects, soil microbes, and nematodes) and ecosystem multifunctionality (including plant biomass production, plant leaf N and P, above-ground insect abundance, nutrient cycling, soil C stocks, water regulation, and plant–microbe symbiosis) in the world’s largest remaining grassland. We also considered the potential dependence of ecosystem multifunctionality on multidiversity. We found that livestock diversification substantially increased ecosystem multifunctionality by increasing multidiversity. The link between multidiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality was always stronger than the link between single diversity components and functions. Our work provides insights into the importance of multitrophic diversity to maintain multifunctionality in managed ecosystems and suggests that diversifying livestock could promote both multidiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality in an increasingly managed world.
- multiple trophic diversity
- ecosystem multifunctionality
- grassland grazing management
- livestock diversity
- mixed grazing
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: wangd{at}nenu.edu.cn.
Author contributions: L.W. and D.W. designed research; Jun Liu, C.F., Jushan Liu, Z.Z., H.Z., X.Y., Q.C., and C.L. performed research; M.D.-B. and F.I. analyzed data; and L.W., M.D.-B., D.W., and F.I. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. R.S.R. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
Data deposition: Data reported in this paper have been deposited in the Dryad Digital Repository database, datadryad.org/ (doi: 10.5061/dryad.dv44mg0).
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1807354116/-/DCSupplemental.
- Copyright © 2019 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY).
References
Diversifying livestock promotes multidiversity and multifunctionality in managed grasslands
Sign up for Article Alerts
Article Classifications
- Biological Sciences
- Sustainability Science
Jump to section
You May Also be Interested in
A lack of understanding is undermining decision makers’ capacity to develop policies that ensure the planet can sustainably meet future human food demands.
Image credit: Shutterstock/Olga Klochanko.
Researchers report negative emotional contagion, or the coordination of emotional states between multiple individuals, in common ravens, suggesting convergent emotional evolution in birds and mammals.
Image courtesy of Jessie E. C. Adriaense.
A study examines trends in global fishing fleets and finds that by 2015, 68% of the global fishing fleet became motorized, and that the overall number of fleet vessels increased to 3.7 million, despite a consistent decrease in the catch per unit of effort.
Image courtesy of Pixabay/3282700.
A method to determine gender from fingerprints suggests pottery making was not a primarily female activity in ancient Puebloan society, challenging previous assumptions about gendered divisions of labor in ancient societies.
Image courtesy of John Kantner.