A Mixed Model for Assessing the Effect of Numerous Plant Species Interactions on Grassland Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function Relationships
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Issue Date
2022-09-01Author
McDonnell, Jack
McKenna, Thomas
Yurkonis, Kathryn A.
Hennessy, Deirdre
de Andrade Moral, Rafael
Brophy, Caroline
Publisher
Springer
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, author accepted manuscript
Rights
Copyright © 2022, The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license.
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Show full item recordAbstract
In grassland ecosystems, it is well known that increasing plant species diversity can improve ecosystem functions (i.e., ecosystem responses), for example, by increasing productivity and reducing weed invasion. Diversity-Interactions models use species proportions and their interactions as predictors in a regression framework to assess biodiversity and ecosystem function relationships. However, it can be difficult to model numerous interactions if there are many species, and interactions may be temporally variable or dependent on spatial planting patterns. We developed a new Diversity-Interactions mixed model for jointly assessing many species interactions and within-plot species planting pattern over multiple years. We model pairwise interactions using a small number of fixed parameters that incorporate spatial effects and supplement this by including all pairwise interaction variables as random effects, each constrained to have the same variance within each year. The random effects are indexed by pairs of species within plots rather than a plot-level factor as is typical in mixed models, and capture remaining variation due to pairwise species interactions parsimoniously. We apply our novel methodology to three years of weed invasion data from a 16-species grassland experiment that manipulated plant species diversity and spatial planting pattern and test its statistical properties in a simulation study. Supplementary materials accompanying this paper appear online.
Citation
McDonnell, J., McKenna, T., Yurkonis, K.A. et al. A Mixed Model for Assessing the Effect of Numerous Plant Species Interactions on Grassland Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function Relationships. JABES 28, 1–19 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13253-022-00505-2
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