Disentangling relationships between plant diversity and decomposition processes under forest restoration

Biodiversity has been elucidated to be one of the major factors sustaining ecosystem functioning. The vast majority of studies showing a relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning have come from experiments, and this knowledge has not yet been applied to most real-world cases of conservation and management. This is especially true in forest ecosystems, characterized by the dominance of long-lived organisms (trees) and high levels of structural complexity and environmental heterogeneity. To apply biodiversity–function relationships to actual forest management, there are several issues to be considered. These include employing a cross-taxon perspective, as some functions (e.g. soil biogeochemical processes) cannot be maintained by a narrow set of organisms, as is usually the case with experimental systems. More specifically, although the interaction between above- and below-ground diversity is important for many functions in forests, there are few studies that evaluated ...