Understanding how to scale up effects of biological diversity on ecosystem functioning and services remains challenging. There is a general consensus that biodiversity loss alters ecosystem processes underpinning the goods and services upon which humanity depends. Yet, most of that consensus stems from experiments performed at small spatial-scales for short time-frames, which limits transferability of conclusions to longer-term, landscape-scale conservation policies and management. Here we develop quantitative scaling relationships linking 374 experiments that tested plant diversity effects on biomass production across a range of scales. We show that biodiversity effects increase by factors of 1.68 and 1.10 for each 10-fold increase in experiment temporal and spatial scales, respectively. Contrary to prior studies, our analyses suggest that the time scale of experiments, rather than their spatial scale, is the primary source of variation in biodiversity effects. But consistent with earlier research, our analyses reveal that complementarity effects, rather than selection effects, drive the positive space-time interactions for plant diversity effects. Importantly, we also demonstrate complex space-time interactions and nonlinear responses that emphasize how simple extrapolations from small-scale experiments are likely to underestimate biodiversity effects in real-world ecosystems. Quantitative scaling relationships from this research are a crucial step towards bridging controlled experiments that identify biological mechanisms across a range of scales. Predictions from scaling relationships like these could then be compared with observations for fine-tuning the relationships and ultimately improving their capacities to predict consequences of biodiversity loss for ecosystem functioning and services over longer time-frames across real-world landscapes.

中文翻译：

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跨空间和跨时间扩展生物多样性-生态系统功能关系

了解如何扩大生物多样性对生态系统功能和服务的影响仍然具有挑战性。人们普遍认为，生物多样性的丧失会改变支撑人类赖以生存的商品和服务的生态系统过程。然而，大多数共识源于在小空间尺度上进行的短期实验，这限制了结论向长期、景观尺度保护政策和管理的可转移性。在这里，我们开发了量化比例关系，将 374 项实验联系起来，这些实验测试了植物多样性对一系列规模的生物量生产的影响。我们表明，实验时间和空间尺度每增加 10 倍，生物多样性效应分别增加 1.68 和 1.10 倍。与之前的研究相反，我们的分析表明，实验的时间尺度而非空间尺度是生物多样性影响变化的主要来源。但与早期研究一致，我们的分析表明，互补效应，而不是选择效应，推动了植物多样性效应的积极时空相互作用。重要的是，我们还展示了复杂的时空相互作用和非线性响应，强调了小规模实验的简单推断可能会低估现实世界生态系统中的生物多样性影响。这项研究的定量尺度关系是桥接控制实验的关键一步，这些实验可识别一系列尺度的生物机制。