Macroecological rules predict how biomass scales with species richness in nature.

Despite advances in theory and experiments, how biodiversity influences the structure and functioning of natural ecosystems remains debated. By applying new theory to data on 84,695 plant, animal, and protist assemblages, we show that the general positive effect of species richness on stocks of biomass, as well as much of the variation in the strength and sign of this effect, is predicted by a fundamental macroecological quantity: the scaling of species abundance with body mass. Standing biomass increases with richness when large-bodied species are numerically rare but is independent of richness when species size and abundance are uncoupled. These results suggest a new fundamental law in the structure of ecological communities and show that the impacts of changes in species richness on biomass are predictable.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Science

• Publication date

  2025-03-21

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/science.adq3278PMID 40112057
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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