Abstract
Species extinctions from local communities can negatively affect ecosystem functioning1. Ecological mechanisms underlying these impacts are well studied2–4 but the role of evolutionary processes is rarely assessed5,6. Using a long-term field experiment, we tested whether natural selection in plant communities increased the effects of biodiversity on productivity. We re-assembled communities with 8-year co-selection history adjacent to naïve communities with identical species composition but no history of co-selection. Mixtures of two to four co-selected species were more productive than their corresponding naïve communities over four years in soils with or without co-selected microbial communities. At the highest diversity level of eight plant species, no such differences were observed. Our findings suggest that plant community evolution can lead to rapid increases in ecosystem functioning at low diversity but may take longer at high diversity. This effect was not modified by treatments that simulated additional co-evolutionary processes between plants and soil organisms.