ArticleNature communications2019
Global evidence of positive biodiversity effects on spatial ecosystem stability in natural grasslands.
Article in Nature communications, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Biodiversity promotes ecosystem functioning despite environmental change.Ecology letters · 2022Pooled it
- Response diversity increases functional but decreases compositional stability of grassland communities.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Heat requirement, not warming, governs the urban-rural disparity in spring phenology advancement.Innovation (Cambridge (Mass.)) · 2026Article
- Effects of Climatic Factors and Disturbance on Plant Above-Ground Biomass and Species Diversity of Chinese Grasslands: A Meta-Analysis.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Beyond the silos: A global evidence synthesis of biodiversity, water, food, health and climate nexus interactions.iScience · 2026Review
- Differential Responses of Community Biomass Stability to Short-Term Nitrogen and Phosphorus Inputs in Two Dominant Plant Communities of the Songnen Grassland, Northeast China.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The role of functional native herbage in improving community stability: evidence from a grazing and nitrogen addition experiment in an alpine meadow of Qinghai-Xizang Plateau.BMC plant biology · 2026Article
- Plateau pika control degrades grasslands while grazing exclusion provides no habitat improvement.iScience · 2026Article
- Positive mixture effects in pine-oak forests during drought are context-dependent.Plant biology (Stuttgart, Germany) · 2026Article
- Biomass Exhibited Greater Sensitivity to Degradation Than Community Structure in an Alpine Meadow.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Highly protected areas buffer against aridity thresholds in global drylands.Nature plants · 2025Article
- How does species rarity influence the functional diversity and resilience along the successional pathway in heterogeneous karst forests?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Interactive and unimodal relationships between plant biomass, abiotic factors, and plant diversity in global grasslands.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Effect of wetland degradation on plant community characteristic and aboveground biomass in the lower reaches of the Yellow River.Frontiers in plant science · 2025Article
- An Investigation of the Magnitude of the Role of Different Plant Species in Grassland Communities on Species Diversity, China.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Stability in plant-pollinator communities across organizational levels: present, gaps, and future.AoB PLANTS · 2024Article
- Plant diversity increases spatial stability of aboveground productivity in alpine grasslands.Oecologia · 2024Article
- The positive effect of plant diversity on soil carbon depends on climate.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Water-limited environments affect the association between functional diversity and forest productivity.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Clarifying the effect of biodiversity on productivity in natural ecosystems with longitudinal data and methods for causal inference.Nature communications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The effect of biodiversity on primary productivity has been a hot topic in ecology for over 20 years. Biodiversity-productivity relationships in natural ecosystems are highly variable, although positive relationships are most common. Understanding the conditions under which different relationships emerge is still a major challenge. Here, by analyzing HerbDivNet data, a global survey of natural grasslands, we show that biodiversity stabilizes rather than increases plant productivity in natural grasslands at the global scale. Our results suggest that the effect of species richness on productivity shifts from strongly positive in low-productivity communities to strongly negative in high-productivity communities. Thus, plant richness maintains community productivity at intermediate levels. As a result, it stabilizes plant productivity against environmental heterogeneity across space. Unifying biodiversity-productivity and biodiversity-spatial stability relationships at the global scale provides a new perspective on the functioning of natural ecosystems.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.