生物多样性和生态系统功能之间的正比关系已牢固确定，但这种关系的具体情形却会有所不同。将实验演化与生物多样性-生态系统功能实验结合起来的一项研究，可帮助提供这方面的详细情况。研究人员生成了20个海洋细菌物种，以便让它们适应少量资源（专性物种）或很多资源（广谱物种），并能够对由这些菌种构建的群落的生物多样性进行操纵。结果证明，专性物种的群体平均来说生产力更高，因为它们能够利用环境的异质性，但专性物种对于“生物多样性-生态系统功能曲线”斜率的贡献更大。这项工作为决定物种灭绝所产生的功能后果的进化史首次提供了实验证据，并且对于保护策略方面的工作也有参考价值。（生物谷Bioon.com）
生物谷推荐原文出处：
Nature doi:10.1038/nature09592
Experimental niche evolution alters the strength of the diversity–productivity relationship
Dominique Gravel,Thomas Bell,Claire Barbera,Thierry Bouvier,Thomas Pommier,Patrick Venail& Nicolas Mouquet
The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) has become a cornerstone of community and ecosystem ecology1, 2, 3 and an essential criterion for making decisions in conservation biology and policy planning4, 5. It has recently been proposed that evolutionary history should influence the BEF relationship because it determines species traits and, thus, species’ ability to exploit resources6, 7. Here we test this hypothesis by combining experimental evolution with a BEF experiment. We isolated 20 bacterial strains from a marine environment and evolved each to be generalists or specialists8. We then tested the effect of evolutionary history on the strength of the BEF relationship with assemblages of 1 to 20 species constructed from the specialists, generalists and ancestors9. Assemblages of generalists were more productive on average because of their superior ability to exploit the environmental heterogeneity10. The slope of the BEF relationship was, however, stronger for the specialist assemblages because of enhanced niche complementarity. These results show how the BEF relationship depends critically on the legacy of past evolutionary events.
