Quantifying elemental diversity to study landscape ecosystem function

The movement, distribution, and relative proportions of essential elements across the landscape should influence the structure and functioning of biological communities. Yet, our basic understanding of the spatial distribution of elements, particularly bioavailable elements, across landscapes is limited. Here, we propose a quantitative framework to study the causes and consequences of spatial patterns of elements. Specifically, we integrate distribution models, dissimilarity metrics, and spatial smoothing to predict how the distribution of bioavailable elements changes with spatial extent. Our community and landscape ecology perspective on elemental diversity highlights the characteristic relationships that emerge among elements in landscapes and that can be measured empirically to help us pinpoint ecosystem control points. This step forward provides a mechanistic link between community and ecosystem processes.