Data from: Diversifying livestock promotes multidiversity and multifunctionality in managed grasslands

Increasing plant diversity can increase ecosystem functioning,stability,
and services in both natural and managed grasslands,but the effects of
herbivore diversity, and especially of livestock diversity, remain
underexplored. Given that managed grazing is the most extensive land use
worldwide, and that land managers can readily change livestock diversity,
we experimentally tested how livestock diversification (sheep, cattle, or
both) influenced multidiversity (the diversity of plants, insects, soil
microbes, and nematodes) and ecosystem multifunctionality (including plant
biomass production, plant leaf N and P, above-ground insect abundance,
nutrient cycling, soil C stocks, water regulation, and plant–microbe
symbiosis) in the world’s largest remaining grassland. We also considered
the potential dependence of ecosystem multifunctionality on
multidiversity. We found that livestock diversification substantially
increased ecosystem multifunctionality by increasing multidiversity. The
link between multidiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality was always
stronger than the link between single diversity components and functions.
Our work provides insights into the importance of multitrophic diversity
to maintain multifunctionality in managed ecosystems and suggests that
diversifying livestock could promote both multidiversity and ecosystem
multifunctionality in an increasingly managed world.