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. 2020 Sep 11;11:4547. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-18296-w

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 2 — The results are based on mass loss as a measure of decomposition rate. Note that ranges of x-axis differ among the panels a–f. a Analyzed by ecosystem types for all litter types; b by ecosystem types for leaf litter; c–f by ecosystem types and climatic zones for leaf litter. Open circles and error bars represent means and the 95% confidence intervals, respectively. Number of comparisons (n), treatments (t), and studies (s) are shown. Positive values of the effect size indicate faster decomposition in mixed-species litter than mono-species litter. Vertical dotted lines are to indicate the effect size of zero. Mixed-effect meta-regression showed significant differences in the effect sizes when analyzed with ecosystem types (Q_M = 52.64, d.f. = 5, p < 0.0001), climate regions (Q_M = 13.30, d.f. = 5, p = 0.02), and both of them together (Q_M = 69.69, d.f. = 10, p < 0.0001) as a moderator variable(s). For a comparison by climate zones, tropical and subtropical biomes were assigned as tropics to ensure the number of studies required for the analysis. Results for data types with three and more studies are shown.