Connecting biodiversity and ecosystem sciences: A functional biogeography perspective

Background/Question/Methods

            The impact of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning has been widely acknowledged, and the importance of the functional roles of species, as well as their diversity, in the control of ecosystem processes has been recently emphasized. However bridging biodiversity and ecosystem science to address issues at a biogeographic scale is still in its infancy. This is the primary goal of the emergent field of functional biogeography. While the rise of Big Data has catalysed functional biogeography studies in recent years, comprehensive evidences remain scarce. Here, we present the rationale and the first results of the DIVGRASS project, an interdisciplinary initiative that focused on the French C₃ Permanent Grasslands. DIVGRASS aimed at collating, integrating and processing large databases of vegetation relevés, plant traits and environmental layers to elucidate biodiversity-ecosystem functioning at large scales and ultimately predict the sensitivity of ecosystem processes and services to environmental changes.

Results/Conclusions

We outline the theoretical background, data availability, ecoinformatics challenges associated with the approach and its feasibility. We provide a case study of scaling from vegetation relevés to the mapping of leaf dry matter content averaged at the ecosystem level and the predictions of ecosystem digestibility at a national scale. The DIVGRASS framework sets milestones for further hypothesis testing in functional biogeography and earth system modelling.