ADAPT Trinity College Dublin academic Prof. Caroline Brophy has recently published a new paper in Journal of Ecology from the British Ecological Society evaluating the impact of species diversity in agricultural ecosystems. Titled “Design principles for multi-species productive grasslands: Quantifying effects of diversity beyond richness”, the paper investigates how to identify combinations of plant species that best deliver one or multiple functions and explores when community species and proportions are more important than the number of species, or species richness, alone.
The paper outlines statistical methods that dissect plant diversity into three components: species richness, composition, and relative abundance. By distinguishing these components, the authors explain how a more detailed understanding of species diversity can support the development of nature-based solutions to improve the sustainability of agricultural ecosystems.
Additional contributors to this paper are John Finn and Natalie Oram of Teagasc Environment Research Centre in Wexford, Matthias Suter and Andreas Lüscher of Agroscope, Forage Production and Grassland Systems in Zurich, and Rishabh Vishwakarma of the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin.
The paper is available here: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2745.14314
