Response to Comment on "Worldwide evidence of a unimodal relationship between productivity and plant species richness"

Lauchlan H Fraser; Meelis Pärtel; Jason Pither; Anke Jentsch; Marcelo Sternberg; Martin Zobel

doi:10.1126/science.aad4874

Response to Comment on "Worldwide evidence of a unimodal relationship between productivity and plant species richness"

Science. 2015 Dec 4;350(6265):1177. doi: 10.1126/science.aad4874.

Authors

Lauchlan H Fraser¹, Meelis Pärtel², Jason Pither³, Anke Jentsch⁴, Marcelo Sternberg⁵, Martin Zobel²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Natural Resource Sciences, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, Canada. [email protected].
² Department of Botany, Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia.
³ Department of Biology, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, Kelowna, BC, Canada.
⁴ Department of Disturbance Ecology, Bayreuth Center of Ecology and Environmental Research, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany.
⁵ Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants, Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel.

PMID: 26785471
DOI: 10.1126/science.aad4874

Abstract

Laanisto and Hutchings claim that the local species pool is a more important predictor of local plant species richness than biomass and that when the species pool is considered, there is no hump-backed relationship between biomass and richness. However, we show that by calculating a more appropriate measure of species pool, community completeness, both regional and local processes shape local richness.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Comment

MeSH terms

Biodiversity*
Grassland*
Plant Development*