Beyond Biodiversity: How Trait Organization of Ecosystem Engineers Drives Ecosystem Resilience

Ecosystem functioning and resilience are assumed to depend on biodiversity, but what if they don’t? In systems dominated by ecosystem engineers, such as seagrasses and salt marshes, the way traits are organized within a single species may be the real driver of functioning. While extreme stress is known to narrow the range of traits, it is unclear how relationships among traits respond to stress variability. Predictable stress could tighten traits into coordinated patterns, while unpredictable stress might decouple traits, creating redundancy and buffering functions in ways biodiversity theory does not predict. Trait organization may therefore determine how well key ecosystem functions are maintained. If supported, this could rewrite our understanding of resilience, showing that ecosystems succeed or fail not because of diversity, but because of how traits are structured. These insights would provide a new framework to predict ecosystem stability under extreme environmental stress.