Functional redundancy can increase the resilience of ecosystem processes by providing insurance against species loss and the effects of abundance fluctuations. However, due to the difficulty of assessing individual species’ contributions and the lack of a metric allowing for a quantification of redundancy within communities, few attempts have been made to estimate redundancy for individual ecosystem processes. We present a new method linking interaction metrics with metabolic theory that allows for a quantification of redundancy at the level of ecosystem processes. Using this approach, redundancy in the predation on aphids and other prey by natural enemies across a landscape heterogeneity gradient was estimated. Functional redundancy of predators was high in heterogeneous landscapes, low in homogeneous landscapes, and scaled with predator specialisation. Our approach allows quantifying functional redundancy within communities and can be used to assess the role of functional redundancy across a wide variety of ecosystem processes and environmental factors

MGCA, community composition and landscape dataData file used for the calculation of functional redundancy in natural predator communities. Treatment: C = conventional, O = organic; Abundance = activity density corrected by metabolic rate; H' = Shannon diversity of the landscape at 500 and 1000 m radius, respectively; Border = cumulative length of borders between habitat patches; Patches = number of distinct habitat patches within 1000 m radius.Raw data.csv