Despite the importance of microbial communities for ecosystem services and human welfare, the relationship between microbial diversity and multiple ecosystem functions and services (that is, multifunctionality) at the global scale has yet to be evaluated. Here we use two independent, large-scale databases with contrasting geographic coverage (from 78 global drylands and from 179 locations acros...

Global change, like droughts, can destabilize the carbon sink function of peatlands, either directly or indirectly through changes in plant community composition. While the effects of drought and plant community composition on individual carbon (C) related processes are well understood, their effect on multiple C-related processes simultaneously-multifunctionality-is poorly known. We studied th...

Increasing attention has been paid to the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) because of the rapid increase in species loss. However, over the past 20 years, most BEF studies only focused on the effect of species diversity on one or a few ecosystem functions, and only a few studies focused on ecosystem multifunctionality (i.e., the simultaneous provision of several...

Because industrial agriculture keeps expanding in Southeast Asia at the expense of natural forests and traditional swidden systems, comparing biodiversity and ecosystem services in the traditional forest-swidden agriculture system vs. monocultures is needed to guide decision making on land-use planning. Focusing on tree diversity, soil erosion control, and climate change mitigation through carb...

We manipulated soil animal communities in combination with nitrogen fertilization and found that individual grassland ecosystem functions had contrasting responses across the manipulations (1). We therefore cautioned against using a single multifunctionality index that aggregates individual functions to characterize overall ecosystem functioning (1). Byrnes et al. (2) contend that this caution ...

Ecosystem management policies increasingly emphasize provision of multiple, as opposed to single, ecosystem services. Management for such "multifunctionality" has stimulated research into the role that biodiversity plays in providing desired rates of multiple ecosystem processes. Positive effects of biodiversity on indices of multifunctionality are consistently found, primarily because species ...

Although there is mounting evidence that biodiversity is an important and widespread driver of ecosystem multifunctionality, much of this research has focused on small-scale biodiversity manipulations. Hence, which mechanisms maintain patches of enhanced biodiversity in natural systems and if these patches elevate ecosystem multifunctionality at both local and landscape scales remain outstandin...