Data from: Engineering a plant community to deliver multiple ecosystem services

The sustainable delivery of multiple ecosystem services requires the
management of functionally diverse biological communities. In an
agricultural context, an emphasis on food production has often led to a
loss of biodiversity to the detriment of other ecosystem services such as
the maintenance of soil health and pest regulation. In scenarios where
multiple species can be grown together, it may be possible to better
balance environmental and agronomic services through the targeted
selection of companion species. We used the case study of legume-based
cover crops to engineer a plant community that delivered the optimal
balance of six ecosystem services: early productivity, regrowth following
mowing, weed suppression, support of invertebrates, soil fertility
building (measured as yield of following crop), and conservation of
nutrients in the soil. An experimental species pool of 12 cultivated
legume species was screened for a range of functional traits and ecosystem
services at five sites across a geographical gradient in the United
Kingdom. All possible species combinations were then analyzed, using a
process-based model of plant competition, to identify the community that
delivered the best balance of services at each site. In our system, low to
intermediate levels of species richness (one to four species) that
exploited functional contrasts in growth habit and phenology were
identified as being optimal. The optimal solution was determined largely
by the number of species and functional diversity represented by the
starting species pool, emphasizing the importance of the initial selection
of species for the screening experiments. The approach of using
relationships between functional traits and ecosystem services to design
multifunctional biological communities has the potential to inform the
design of agricultural systems that better balance agronomic and
environmental services and meet the current objective of European
agricultural policy to maintain viable food production in the context of
the sustainable management of natural resources.