Isbell Biodiversity Lab

About - We are investigating the causes and consequences of changes in biodiversity. We study how biodiversity and ecosystem functioning respond to global environmental changes, such as land use changes, nutrient enrichment, exotic species introductions, and climate extremes. We also study the responses of ecosystem functioning and ecosystem services to changes in biodiversity.

Research Questions
Featured Publications

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

How do global environmental changes impact biodiversity and ecosystems?
How do changes in biodiversity influence ecosystems?
How do species coexist in diverse communities?

Isbell et al. 2011 Nature

Here we show that 84% of the 147 grassland plant species studied in 17 biodiversity experiments promoted ecosystem functioning at least once. Different species promoted ecosystem functioning during different years, at different places, for different functions and under different environmental change scenarios. Our results suggest that although species may appear functionally redundant when one function is considered under one set of environmental conditions, many species are needed to maintain multiple functions at multiple times and places in a changing world.

Isbell et al. 2013 PNAS

Here we found that although chronic nitrogen enrichment initially increased productivity, it also led to loss of plant species, including initially dominant species, which then caused substantial diminishing returns from nitrogen fertilization. In contrast, elevated CO₂ did not decrease grassland plant diversity, and it consistently promoted productivity over time. Our results support the hypothesis that the long-term impacts of anthropogenic drivers of environmental change on ecosystem functioning can strongly depend on how such drivers gradually decrease biodiversity and restructure communities.

Isbell et al. 2013 Ecol. Lett.

Our 30-year grassland experiment shows that plant diversity decreased well below control levels after 10 years of chronic high rates of nitrogen addition, and did not recover to control levels 20 years after nitrogen addition ceased. Furthermore, we found a hysteretic response of plant diversity to increases and subsequent decreases in soil nitrate concentrations. Our results suggest that chronic nutrient enrichment created an alternative low-diversity state that persisted despite decreases in soil nitrate after cessation of nitrogen addition, and despite supply of propagules from nearby high-diversity plots.

Isbell et al. 2015 Nature

We found that biodiversity increased ecosystem resistance for a broad range of climate events, including wet or dry, moderate or extreme, and brief or prolonged events. By a year after each climate event, ecosystem productivity had often fully recovered, or over-shot, normal levels of productivity in both high- and low-diversity communities, leading to no detectable dependence of ecosystem resilience on biodiversity. Our results suggest that biodiversity mainly stabilizes ecosystem productivity, and productivity-dependent ecosystem services, by increasing resistance to climate events.

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Authors	Year	Title	Source	PDF
Turnbull, Isbell, et al.	2016	Understanding the value of plant diversity for ecosystem functioning through niche theory	Proc. R. Soc. B In press
Keeler, …, Isbell, et al.	2016	The social cost of nitrogen: a spatially explicit framework for evaluating the nitrogen externality	Science Advances In press
Fujii, …, Isbell	2016	Tree diversity improves decomposition rate and litter stabilization through mediating herbaceous diversity under forest restoration	Journal of Applied Ecology In press
Gonzalez, …, Isbell, et al.	2016	Estimating local biodiversity change: a critique of papers claiming no net loss of local diversity	Ecology 97:1949-1960
Craven, Isbell, et al.	2016	Plant diversity effects on grassland productivity are robust to both nutrient enrichment and drought	Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 371:20150277
Mori, Isbell, et al.	2016	Low multifunctional redundancy of soil fungal diversity at multiple spatial scales	Ecology Letters 19:249-259

Isbell et al.	2015	Biodiversity increases the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate extremes	Nature 526:574-577	PDF
Isbell et al.	2015	The biodiversity-dependent ecosystem services debt	Ecology Letters 18:119-134	PDF
Isbell	2015	Agroecosystem diversification	Nature Plants 1:15041	PDF
Tilman and Isbell	2015	Biodiversity: recovery as nitrogen declines	Nature 528:336-337	PDF
Hautier, …, Isbell, et al.	2015	Anthropogenic environmental changes impact ecosystem stability via biodiversity	Science 348:336-340	PDF
Zhang, …, Isbell, et al.	2015	Productivity depends more on the rate than the frequency of N addition	Scientific Reports 5:12558	PDF
Dooley, Isbell, et al.	2015	Testing the effects of diversity on ecosystem multifunctionality using a multivariate model	Ecology Letters 18:1242-1251	PDF
Lefcheck, …, Isbell, et al.	2015	Biodiversity enhances ecosystem multifunctionality across taxa, trophic levels, and habitats	Nature Communications 6:6936	PDF
Avolio, …, Isbell, et al.	2015	A framework for quantifying the magnitude and variability of community responses to global change drivers	Ecosphere 6:280	PDF
Venail, …, Isbell, et al.	2015	Species richness, but not phylogenetic diversity, influences community biomass production and temporal stability in a re-examination of 16 grassland biodiversity studies	Functional Ecology 29:615-626	PDF
Clark, …, Isbell, et al.	2015	Spatial 'convergent cross mapping' to detect causal relationships from short time-series	Ecology 96:1174-1181	PDF

Isbell and Loreau	2014	Sustainability of human ecological niche construction	Ecology and Society 19:45	PDF
Isbell	2014	Ecosystem Services	In Oxford Bibliographies in Ecology. Ed. David Gibson. New York: Oxford University Press
Tilman, Isbell, and Cowles	2014	Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning	Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 45:471-493	PDF
Byrnes, …, Isbell, et al.	2014	Multifunctionality does not imply that all functions are positively correlated	Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 111:E5490	PDF
Zhang, …, Isbell, et al.	2014	Rapid plant species loss at high rates and at low frequency of N addition in temperate steppe	Global Change Biology 20:3520-3529	PDF
Byrnes, …, Isbell, et al.	2014	Investigating the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality: challenges and solutions	Methods in Ecology and Evolution 5:111-124	PDF
Balvanera, …, Isbell, et al.	2014	Linking biodiversity and ecosystem services: current uncertainties and the necessary next step	Bioscience 64:49-57	PDF

Isbell et al.	2013	Nutrient enrichment, biodiversity loss, and consequent declines in ecosystem productivity	Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 110:11911–11916	PDF
Isbell et al.	2013	Low biodiversity state persists two decades after cessation of nutrient enrichment	Ecology Letters 16:454-460	PDF
Isbell and Loreau	2013	Human impacts on minimum subsets of species critical for maintaining ecosystem structure	Basic and Applied Ecology 14:623-629	*PDF*
Polley, Isbell, and Wilsey	2013	Plant functional traits improve diversity-based predictions of temporal stability of grassland productivity	Oikos 122:1275-1282	*PDF*
Huang, …, Isbell, et al.	2013	Is community persistence related to diversity? A test with prairie species in a long-term experiment	Basic and Applied Ecology 14:199-207	*PDF*
de Mazancourt, Isbell, et al.	2013	Predicting ecosystem stability from community composition and biodiversity	Ecology Letters 16:617-625	*PDF*
Connolly, …, Isbell, et al.	2013	An improved model to predict the effects of changing biodiversity levels on ecosystem function	Journal of Ecology 101:344-355	PDF

Reich, …, Isbell, et al.	2012	Impacts of biodiversity loss escalate through time as redundancy fades	Science 336:589-592	PDF
Tilman, Reich, and Isbell	2012	Biodiversity impacts ecosystem productivity as much as resources, disturbance, or herbivory	Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 109:10394-10397	PDF
Loreau, …, Isbell, et al.	2012	Niche and fitness differences relate the maintenance of diversity to ecosystem function: comment	Ecology 93:1482-1487	PDF
Eisenhauer, Reich, and Isbell	2012	Decomposer diversity and identity influence plant diversity effects on ecosystem functioning	Ecology 93:2227-2240	PDF

Isbell et al.	2011	High plant diversity is needed to maintain ecosystem services	Nature 477:199-202	PDF
Isbell and Wilsey	2011	Increasing native, but not exotic, biodiversity increases aboveground productivity in ungrazed and intensely grazed grasslands	Oecologia 165: 771-781	*PDF*
Isbell and Wilsey	2011	Rapid biodiversity declines in both ungrazed and intensely grazed exotic grasslands	Plant Ecology 212:1663-1674	*PDF*
Hector, …, Isbell, et al.	2011	BUGS in the analysis of biodiversity experiments: species richness and composition are of similar importance for grassland productivity	PLoS ONE 6: e17434	*PDF*

Isbell	2010	Causes and consequences of changing biodiversity	Nature Education Knowledge 1: 11

Isbell, Polley, and Wilsey	2009	Biodiversity, productivity, and the temporal stability of productivity: patterns and processes	Ecology Letters 12: 443-451	PDF
Isbell, Polley, and Wilsey	2009	Species interaction mechanisms maintain grassland plant species diversity	Ecology 90: 1821-1830	PDF
Wilsey, …, Isbell, et al.	2009	Biodiversity maintenance mechanisms differ between native and exotic communities	Ecology Letters 12: 432-442	*PDF*

Isbell et al.	2008	Diversity-productivity relationships in two ecologically realistic rarity-extinction scenarios	Oikos 117: 996-1005	PDF