PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Patrick L. Thompson
AU  - Sonia Kéfi
AU  - Yuval R. Zelnik
AU  - Laura E. Dee
AU  - Shaopeng Wang
AU  - Claire de Mazancourt
AU  - Michel Loreau
AU  - Andrew Gonzalez
TI  - Scaling up biodiversity ecosystem functioning relationships: the role of environmental variability in space and time
AID  - 10.1101/2020.11.04.367250
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.11.04.367250
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/11/05/2020.11.04.367250.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/11/05/2020.11.04.367250.full
AB  - The biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationship is expected to depend on the spatial or temporal scale at which it is measured. Environmental variation is hypothesized to explain this scale dependence because it influences how quickly biodiversity accumulates with scale. However, this link has yet to be demonstrated in a formal model. Here we use a Lotka-Volterra competition model to simulate community dynamics when environmental conditions vary across either space or time. Species differ in their optimal environmental conditions, which results in turnover in community composition. We vary biodiversity by modelling communities with different sized regional species pools and ask how the amount of biomass per unit area depends on the number of species present, and the spatial or temporal scale at which it is measured. We find that more biodiversity is required to maintain functioning at larger temporal and spatial scales. The number of species required increases quickly when environmental autocorrelation is low, and slowly when autocorrelation is high. Both spatial and temporal environmental variation led to scale dependence in BEF, but autocorrelation had larger impacts when environmental change was temporal. These findings show how the biodiversity required to maintain functioning is expected to increase over time and space.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.