ArticleNature communications2023
Clarifying the effect of biodiversity on productivity in natural ecosystems with longitudinal data and methods for causal inference.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Tree growth after a major hurricane reflects predisturbance vigor rather than canopy damage.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Best practices for moving from correlation to causation in ecological research.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Large slow-growing hydrophytes increase wetland carbon storage.Nature plants · 2026Article
- Persistent loss of animal diversity on a rocky shore over nine decades and across multiple investigators.PeerJ · 2026Article
- Grassland degradation alters plant and soil biodiversity-multifunctionality relationships.Nature plants · 2025Article
- The paradoxical impact of drought on West Nile virus risk: insights from long-term ecological data.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Species abundances surpass richness effects in the biodiversity-ecosystem function relationship across marine fishes.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The role of dominant species in community organization and aboveground production in semiarid grasslands.Ecology · 2025Article
- Regime Shifts in Microbial and Water Quality Dynamics in Red Tilapia Ponds.Microorganisms · 2025Article
- Dominant species predict plant richness and biomass in global grasslands.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Causal Effects Versus Causal Mechanisms: Two Traditions With Different Requirements and Contributions Towards Causal Understanding.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Article
- Causal Inference With Observational Data and Unobserved Confounding Variables.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Rapid shifts in grassland communities driven by climate change.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Soil community history strengthens belowground multitrophic functioning across plant diversity levels in a grassland experiment.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Widening global variability in grassland biomass since the 1980s.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Biodiversity loss reduces global terrestrial carbon storage.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Functional diversity enhances dryland forest productivity under long-term climate change.Science advances · 2024Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
31 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Causal effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functions can be estimated using experimental or observational designs - designs that pose a tradeoff between drawing credible causal inferences from correlations and drawing generalizable inferences. Here, we develop a design that reduces this tradeoff and revisits the question of how plant species diversity affects productivity. Our design leverages longitudinal data from 43 grasslands in 11 countries and approaches borrowed from fields outside of ecology to draw causal inferences from observational data. Contrary to many prior studies, we estimate that increases in plot-level species richness caused productivity to decline: a 10% increase in richness decreased productivity by 2.4%, 95% CI [-4.1, -0.74]. This contradiction stems from two sources. First, prior observational studies incompletely control for confounding factors. Second, most experiments plant fewer rare and non-native species than exist in nature. Although increases in native, dominant species increased productivity, increases in rare and non-native species decreased productivity, making the average effect negative in our study. By reducing the tradeoff between experimental and observational designs, our study demonstrates how observational studies can complement prior ecological experiments and inform future ones.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.