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Body size as a predictor of species loss effect on ecosystem functioning.
Séguin A
,
Harvey É
,
Archambault P
,
Nozais C
,
Gravel D
.
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There is an urgent need to develop predictive indicators of the effect of species loss on ecosystem functioning. Body size is often considered as a good indicator because of its relationship to extinction risk and several functional traits. Here, we examined the predictive capacity of species body size in marine and freshwater multitrophic systems. We found a significant, but weak, effect of body size on functioning. The effect was much stronger when considering the effect of body size within trophic position levels. Compared to extinctions ordered by body size, random extinction sequences had lower multiple species loss effects on functioning. Our study is the first to show experimentally, in multitrophic systems, a more negative impact of ordered extinction sequences on ecosystem functioning than random losses. Our results suggest apparent ease in predicting species loss effect on functioning based on easily measured ecological traits that are body size and trophic position.
Figure 1. Effects of body size on ecosystem functioning.The proxies of ecosystem functioning illustrated here are (a) marine multifunctioning, (b) freshwater phytoplankton biomass and (c) marine encrusted algae net production. indicate grazers and indicate non-grazers. The y-axis refer to the effect size between values of functioning recorded in mesocoms with removals and values of functioning recorded in reference mesocoms (no removal).
Figure 2. Effects of taxa removal on ecosystem functioning according to random and non-random extinction sequences.The proxies of ecosystem functioning illustrated here are (a) periphyton dry mass (b) marine multifunctioning and (c) freshwater phytoplankton biomass. White boxplots indicate non-random extinction sequences and grey boxplots indicate random extinction sequences. The y-axis refer to the effect size between values of functioning recorded in mesocoms with removals and values of functioning recorded in reference mesocosms (no removal).
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