Comment on "worldwide evidence of a unimodal relationship between productivity and plant species richness"

Abstract

Fraser et al. (Reports, 17 July 2015, p. 302) report that a hump-backed model describes the worldwide relationship between productivity and plant species richness in grassland communities. We reanalyze their data from a larger-scale perspective, using local species pool. This influences richness far more strongly than productivity, and, when this is taken into account, the hump-backed richness-productivity relationship disappears.