Fig. 3 Relative importance of structural diversity, functional dominance, multiple- and single-trait functional diversity metrics used as predictors in the multiple linear model. Statistical fit summaries are presented in Table 1
We analysed the direct and indirect response of AGB to diversity metrics by considering only independent important variables for AGB, as retained in the previous selected model. The outputs of the SEM testing for species richness effect on AGB via functional evenness and structural diversity revealed chi-square values ranging from 0.08 to 1.72 andP > 0.05 (Table 2), indicating good fit of the SEM to the data. The values of cfi (close to 1), and rsmea (<0.16) also demonstrate good fits of the models (Table 2).
Table 2. Summary of fit statistics for the SEMs relating species richness, functional evenness and functional diversity metrics to AGB; cfi: comparative fit index; and rmsea: root mean square error of approximation