Data from: Ecosystem productivity is associated to bacterial phylogenetic distance in surface marine waters

Understanding the link between community diversity and ecosystem function
is a fundamental aspect of ecology. Systematic losses in biodiversity are
widely acknowledged but the impact this may exert on ecosystem functioning
remains ambiguous. There is growing evidence of a positive relationship
between species richness and ecosystem productivity for terrestrial
macroorganisms, but similar links for marine microorganisms, which help
drive global climate, are unclear. Community manipulation experiments show
both positive and negative relationships for microbes. These previous
studies rely, however, on artificial communities and any links between the
full diversity of active bacterial communities in the environment, their
phylogenetic relatedness, and ecosystem function remains hitherto
unexplored. Here we test the hypothesis that productivity is associated to
diversity in the metabolically active fraction of microbial communities.
We show in natural assemblages of active bacteria that communities
containing more distantly related members were associated with higher
bacterial production. The positive phylogenetic diversity–productivity
relationship was independent of community diversity calculated as the
Shannon index. From our long-term (7-year) survey of surface marine
bacterial communities we also found that similarly productive communities
had greater phylogenetic similarity to each other, further suggesting that
the traits of active bacteria are an important predictor of ecosystem
productivity. Our findings demonstrate that the evolutionary history of
the active fraction of a microbial community is critical for understanding
their role in ecosystem functioning.