Evenness, biodiversity, and ecosystem function of intertidal communities along the Italian coasts: Experimental short-term response to ambient and extreme air temperatures

Abstract

Biodiversity can promote ecosystem functioning in both terrestrial and marine environments, emphasizing the necessity of biodiversity conservation in order to preserve critical ecosystem functions and associated services. However, the role of biodiversity in buffering ecosystem functioning under extreme events caused by climate change remains a major scientific issue, especially for intertidal systems experiencing stressors from both terrestrial and marine drivers. We performed a regional-scale field experiment along the Italian coast to investigate the response of unmanipulated intertidal communities (by using a natural biodiversity gradient) to low tide aerial exposure to both ambient and short-term extreme temperatures. We specifically investigated the relationship between Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning (BEF) using different biodiversity indexes (species richness, functional diversity and evenness) and the response of the intertidal communities' ecosystem functioning (community respiration rates). Furthermore, we investigated which other environmental variables could influence the BEF relationship. We show that evenness explained a greater variation in intertidal community ecosystem functioning under both temperature conditions. Species richness (the most often used diversity metric in BEF research) was unrelated to ecosystem functioning, while functional diversity was significantly related to respiration under ambient but not extreme temperatures. We highlight the importance of the short-term thermal history of the communities (measured as body temperature) in the BEF relationship as it was consistently identified as the best predictor or response under both temperature conditions. However, Chlorophyll a in seawater and variation in sea surface temperature also contributed to the BEF relationship under ambient but not under extreme conditions, showing that short-duration climate-driven events can overcome local physiological adaptations. Our findings support the importance of the BEF relationship in intertidal communities, implying that systems with more diverse and homogeneous communities may be able to mitigate the effects of extreme temperatures.

Keywords: Ambient temperature; Climate change; Ecosystem functioning; Evenness; Extreme warming conditions; Functional richness; Intertidal biodiversity; Mediterranean Sea; Species richness.