Functional diversity drives ecosystem multifunctionality in a Pinus yunnanensis natural secondary forest

It is essential to understand how the loss of biodiversity impacts both ecosystem function (EF) and multifunctionality (EMF). Previous studies have mostly focused on predicting how species richness (SR) impacts EMF, while the effect of functional diversity (FD) on EMF remains unclear. Specifically, we know little about the primary functional drivers impacting EMF compared with SR. Therefore, we analysed 8 ecosystem functions within 58 natural secondary forest plots to investigate the effect of FD on both individual EF and EMF. Our results suggest that SR and FD had very significant positive effects on plant phosphorus, soil available phosphorus, and soil total nitrogen. FD explained significantly more variations in these functional responses than SR for individual ecosystem functioning. We also used a multiple threshold approach to test the effect of SR and FD on EMF. We found that FD and SR were positively related to EMF regardless of whether low-level function or high-level function was desired, but FD had a larger effect than SR. Based on the averaging approach, OLS regression, multivariate linear regression model and random forest analysis, we found that SR and FD were both drivers of EMF but that FD had a stronger effect and could explain more variation. As such, we conclude that FD drives ecosystem multifunctionality more than SR.