Life Sciences Commons^™

Grazer Diversity, Functional Redundancy, And Productivity In Seagrass Beds: An Experimental Test, Je Duffy, Ks Macdonald, Jm Rhode, Jd Parker

VIMS Articles

Concern over the accelerating loss of biodiversity has stimulated renewed interest in relationships among species richness, species composition, and the functional properties of ecosystems. Mechanistically, the degree of functional differentiation or complementarity among individual species determines the form of such relationships and is thus important to distinguishing among alternative hypotheses for the effects of diversity on ecosystem processes. Although a growing number of studies have reported relationships between plant diversity and ecosystem processes, few have explicitly addressed how functional diversity at higher trophic levels influences ecosystem processes. We used mesocosm experiments to test the impacts of three herbivorous crustacean species …