Comparing the relative effects of species and size structure on forest productivity in different local environments

ABSTRACT

Understanding diversity-productivity relationships (DPRs) is of theoretical importance and has practical implications for biodiversity conservation and forest management. Although the effects of species diversity and structural diversity on productivity have been a focus of intense research, the relative importance of these effects in different environments remains poorly understood. Based on three extensive datasets obtained from northeastern China, we examine how the species-diversity-productivity and structural-diversity-productivity relationships change with local conditions, and we compare the relative importance of these diversity effects on productivity in the different environments. Our results show that: (1) Positive relationships exist between species diversity and productivity in the overall structural equation model as well as the specific ones for each forest separately. Structural diversity only had a significant effect on productivity in the homogeneous environment of forest 1. (2) Species diversity showed stronger and more consistent effects on productivity than structural diversity. The relationship between structural diversity and productivity was more constrained by local environmental condition.

KEYWORDS:

• Species diversity
• structural diversity
• productivity
• niche complementarity
• local environments

Acknowledgements

We appreciate the constructive comments given by the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author contributions

All authors have materially participated in the research and/or the article preparation. LZ Tan: major contribution to research data and interpretation of results; Fan CY: field works and interpretation of results; CY Zhang: project coordination and interpretation of results; Zhao XH: data and interpretation of results; KV Gadow: interpretation of results. All authors have approved the final article.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (NO. BLX201804) and the Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (32001312; 31971650).