1. Human activities modify the disturbance regimes of tropical forests. Since tropical forests host high biological diversity, understanding the role of biodiversity in ecosystem recovery pathways and the underlying ecological mechanisms is crucial to predict the fate of tropical ecosystems. Studies relying on regularly censused forest plots, rarely include disturbed forests, are not long enough to assess long‐term forest dynamics and often lack repeatability.
2. We used an individual‐based model of tropical forest growth to assess the effect of species and functional diversity on long‐term ecosystem recovery from disturbance. We manipulated the number of species and functional assemblages across a large number of simulations and simulated different levels of disturbance. To investigate the ecological mechanisms that underlie the effect of biodiversity on forest functioning along recovery pathways, we partitioned the net effect of biodiversity on ecosystem properties into complementarity and selection effects over time.
3. We found that functional diversity improved tropical forest resilience after a disturbance. The complementarity effect dominated soon after the disturbance but was progressively surpassed by a selection effect as more competitive species dominated the forest community. This pattern increased with the intensity of the disturbance.
4. Synthesis. We found that the mechanisms through which biodiversity influences forest functioning depend on the ecosystem state, shifting from a dominant complementarity effect in recently disturbed systems to a selection effect in systems disturbed a long time ago. Our results thus suggest that the time since the last disturbance is a key to understanding biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships in tropical forests and can help reconcile previous contrasting results obtained with snapshots of ecosystem state in empirical studies.

中文翻译：

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功能多样性提高了热带森林的复原力：长期虚拟实验的见解

1. 人类活动改变了热带森林的干扰制度。由于热带森林具有很高的生物多样性，因此了解生物多样性在生态系统恢复途径中的作用和潜在的生态机制对于预测热带生态系统的命运至关重要。依靠定期普查的森林地块进行的研究（很少包括受干扰的森林），时间不够长，无法评估长期森林动态，而且常常缺乏可重复性。
2. 我们使用了基于个人的热带森林生长模型来评估物种和功能多样性对长期生态系统从干扰中恢复的影响。我们在大量模拟中操纵了物种和功能集合的数量，并模拟了不同程度的干扰。为了调查生物多样性对沿恢复路径的森林功能产生影响的生态机制，我们将生物多样性对生态系统特性的净影响随时间推移分为互补性和选择效应。
3. 我们发现，扰动后功能多样性提高了热带森林的复原力。互补效应在干扰后很快占主导地位，但随着更具竞争性的物种主导森林群落，选择效应逐渐被互补效应所超越。这种模式随着干扰强度的增加而增加。
4. 综合。我们发现，生物多样性影响森林功能的机制取决于生态系统状态，从最近受干扰的系统中的显性互补效应转变为很久以前受干扰的系统中的选择效应。因此，我们的结果表明，自上次干扰以来的时间是了解热带森林中生物多样性与生态系统功能关系的关键，并且可以帮助调和先前在经验研究中与生态系统状态快照所获得的对比结果。