Data from: Resilience of ecosystem processes: a new approach shows that functional redundancy of biological control services is reduced by landscape simplification

Functional redundancy can increase the resilience of ecosystem processes
by providing insurance against species loss and the effects of abundance
fluctuations. However, due to the difficulty of assessing individual
species’ contributions and the lack of a metric allowing for a
quantification of redundancy within communities, few attempts have been
made to estimate redundancy for individual ecosystem processes. We present
a new method linking interaction metrics with metabolic theory that allows
for a quantification of redundancy at the level of ecosystem processes.
Using this approach, redundancy in the predation on aphids and other prey
by natural enemies across a landscape heterogeneity gradient was
estimated. Functional redundancy of predators was high in heterogeneous
landscapes, low in homogeneous landscapes, and scaled with predator
specialisation. Our approach allows quantifying functional redundancy
within communities and can be used to assess the role of functional
redundancy across a wide variety of ecosystem processes and environmental
factors