Not even wrong: The spurious link between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning
  Resolving the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning has
been one of the central goals of modern ecology. Early debates about the
relationship were finally resolved with the advent of a statistical
partitioning scheme that decomposed the biodiversity effect into a "selection"
effect and a "complementarity" effect. We prove that both the biodiversity
effect and its statistical decomposition into selection and complementarity are
fundamentally flawed because these methods use a naïve null expectation based
on neutrality, likely leading to an overestimate of the net biodiversity
effect, and they fail to account for the nonlinear abundance-ecosystem
functioning relationships observed in nature. Furthermore, under such
nonlinearity no statistical scheme can be devised to partition the biodiversity
effects. We also present an alternative metric providing a more reasonable
estimate of biodiversity effect. Our results suggest that all studies conducted
since the early 1990s likely overestimated the positive effects of biodiversity
on ecosystem functioning.
