What is the difference between the selection effect and mass ratio effect in explaining the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and how are they quantified in natural forest?
to establish the functioning of the forest ecosystem, it is necessary to determine not only the specific diversity of its flora and fauna, as well as for its equitability but also the functional diversity of this habitat; thus you highlight the difference between the effect of the specific selection of each species by deducing its specialty and the mass effect for each one thus deducing the stage of evolution of this habitat. the study and the determination of all these ecological descriptors inform us about the degree of biodiversity of the habitat.
Higher species richness is associated with increased biomass production in plant communities
There are several theories that describe the role of biodiversity in ecosystem function, including the two you mention. The "mass ratio" effect posits that the overall function of the ecosystem is driven mostly by the dominant species and so really its the relative abundance in a given sample of tree is really the key to understanding ecosystem function. Meanwhile the "selection effect" or "green soup hypothesis" can be thought of as the "high performer" effect, where individuals themselves of a few species in sample, perform better on average than those of other species. So when corrected for abundance, these species disproportionally ecosystem function. The other hypothesis that you may have heard about, the "niche complementarity" effect, posits that overall function of a biodiverse tree community is greater than a monoculture with the same number of individuals and is driven by the fact that more niche spaces or resources are being occupied (and conversely fewer untapped niches) and so the ecosystem as a whole is working more efficiently. An example would be an understory species which use light more efficiently and contribute to an overall greater biomass of the community than would a plantation of purely canopy reaching species.
Both mass ratio effects and community diversity drive biomass ...
www.nature.com › scientific reports › articlesFeb 12, 2019 - Secondly, complementarity effects occur when differences in species resource acquisition in space and time allow a more complete utilization of ...by J Sonkoly - 2019
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