Landscape diversity is correlated with satellite-sensed primary productivity in North America

Biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) experiments have established generally positive species richness-productivity relationships in plots of single ecosystem types. Here, we analyzed effects of landscape-level diversity, measured as the number of land-cover types (different ecosystems) per 250 × 250 m, across all of North America. We find that this metric is positively related to landscape-wide remotely-sensed primary production, and that a higher number of land-cover types also is associated with greater temporal stability of productivity, and with accelerated 20-year greening trends, in particular at high latitudes. Species diversity was correlated with landscape-level productivity, but the effect of species diversity and landscape diversity were independent. This indicates that diversity-functioning patterns resembling the ones at smaller scales also exist at higher levels of biological organization.