Plant species composition and key-species abundance drive ecosystem multifunctionality

Global biodiversity loss has generated great interest in the role of plant communities in driving ecosystem functions. There is limited understanding of how soil properties, plant richness, and plant community composition interact to affect ecosystem multifunctionality.
We conducted a constructed-ecosystem experiment by simultaneously manipulating soil origin (i.e., fertile farmland soil and relatively infertile bare land soil), plant richness, and community composition (one-species monoculture, and all possible two-, three-, and four-species combinations of five plants) to evaluate their influence on ecosystem multifunctionality related to the 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).
We found that ecosystem multifunctionality was significantly affected by soil origin, plant community composition, and the community-weighted mean (CWM) of plant biomass, but not by..., 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, all possible two-, three-, and four- species combinations of the five species). The goal was to assess how each manipulation drives ecosystem multifunctionality related to C and N accumulation, greenhouse gas emissions, soil nutrients, soil N-fixing, and mineralization rates of N and P., , # Plant species composition and key-species abundance drive ecosystem multifunctionality

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.63xsj3v86](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.63xsj3v86)

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).

The constructed-ecosystem experiment was conducted in an experimental field of Wuhan Botanical Garden. We used square PVC pots with a bottom inner area of 19 cm, upper area of 25 cm, height of 16 cm, and small holes in the bottom. Five plant species, i.e., Albizia...