BUGS in the Analysis of Biodiversity Experiments: Species Richness and Composition Are of Similar Importance for Grassland Productivity

Andy Hector, Thomas Bell, Yann Hautier, Forest Isbell, Marc Kéry, Peter B Reich, Jasper van Ruijven and Bernhard Schmid

PLOS ONE, 2011, vol. 6, issue 3, 1-10

Abstract: The idea that species diversity can influence ecosystem functioning has been controversial and its importance relative to compositional effects hotly debated. Unfortunately, assessing the relative importance of different explanatory variables in complex linear models is not simple. In this paper we assess the relative importance of species richness and species composition in a multilevel model analysis of net aboveground biomass production in grassland biodiversity experiments by estimating variance components for all explanatory variables. We compare the variance components using a recently introduced graphical Bayesian ANOVA. We show that while the use of test statistics and the R2 gives contradictory assessments, the variance components analysis reveals that species richness and composition are of roughly similar importance for primary productivity in grassland biodiversity experiments.

Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017434 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 17434&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0017434

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017434

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().