Global grassland productivity and carbon storage benefit from functional diversity under climate change.

Functional diversity significantly enhances global grassland productivity and carbon storage, with a 20% loss leading to substantial declines under climate change.

• Why it matters: Understanding how to sustain ecosystem services like productivity and carbon sequestration is critical amid accelerating climate change, yet models often lack large-scale insights into functional diversity's role.
• What they did: Using the LPJmL-CSR model, researchers simulated global managed grasslands under varying levels of functional diversity and climate change scenarios, focusing on GPP and SOC stocks.
• The result: High functional diversity buffers against climate impacts, maintaining GPP and SOC, while its loss hampers adaptation, emphasizing the importance of management practices that promote diversity for ecosystem resilience.