PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Krishna Anujan
AU  - Sebastian A. Heilpern
AU  - Case M. Prager
AU  - Brian C. Weeks
AU  - Shahid Naeem
TI  - Trophic complexity alters the diversity-multifunctionality relationship in experimental grassland mesocosms
AID  - 10.1101/525881
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 525881
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/07/525881.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/07/525881.full
AB  - Changes in diversity can differentially influence multiple ecosystem functions. This diversity-multifunctionality relationship has been documented in experimental studies but the primary focus has been on plant diversity, or a single trophic level. Ecosystems, however, are trophically complex and it remains unclear if positive diversity-multifunctionality relationships found in single-trophic level experiments hold with trophic complexity. To address this concern, we simultaneously manipulated plant diversity and four levels of trophic complexity; (1) plants-only, (2) plants and aboveground mesofauna, (3) plants and belowground mesofauna, and (4) plants and both above- and below-ground mesofauna, in a multifactorial experiment using tall-grass prairie mesocosms established in Cedar Creek, Minnesota, USA. We found that trophic complexity altered both the magnitude and direction of the diversity-multifunctionality relationship. These findings suggest that the adverse consequences to ecosystem multifunctionality attributable to plant diversity loss may be exacerbated with concurrent declines in trophic complexity, an increasingly common feature of terrestrial systems.