Plant species composition and key-species abundance drive ecosystem multifunctionality

Global biodiversity loss has aroused great concern about the role of plant communities in driving ecosystem functions. However, there is limited understanding of how soil property, plant richness, and composition interact to affect ecosystem multifunctionality. We conducted a constructed-ecosystem experiment by simultaneously manipulating soil origin (i.e., fertile farmland soil and infertile bare land soil), plant richness (from one to four species) and composition (five single species, and all possible two-, three-, and four- species combinations of the five species) to evaluate their importance for driving multiple ecosystem functions related to accumulation of biomass, carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in plants, greenhouse gas emissions, soil nutrients, soil N fixation, and mineralization of N and phosphorus (P).