Complementarity of ecosystem types drives landscape-wide productivity in North America

Landscape mosaics with a greater diversity of ecosystems tend to be more
productive, mirroring the well-established relationship between species
diversity and productivity observed in plot-scale biodiversity
experiments. However, the mechanisms driving this effect at the landscape
scale remain unclear. The data presented here was used to analyze a
15-year time series of satellite-derived primary productivity across over
50,000 landscape plots that vary in ecosystem type composition. Our
results demonstrate that more diverse landscapes are more productive and
more predictable under environmental stress, especially drought. Using
statistical partitioning, we show that these diversity effects are
primarily driven by complementarity, with productivity gains that are
broadly shared among ecosystem types rather than being dominated by a few.
The specific ecosystem types that contributed most to landscape
functioning varied regionally, but their role in driving mixture
productivity remained unaffected by drought. These findings extend
biodiversity theory to the landscape scale, emphasizing the critical role
of higher-order diversity in shaping ecosystem function and informing
landscape management.