Reply to: “Results from a biodiversity experiment fail to represent economic performance of semi-natural grasslands”

In Schaub et al., we analyzed plant diversity effects on biomass yield, forage quality, quality-adjusted yield (biomass yield × forage quality) and revenues across different management intensities (extensive to very intensive) within the Jena Experiment (a large-scale grassland biodiversity experiment). For forage quality, we focused especially on metabolizable energy content and milk-production potential, variables rarely assessed economically in a biodiversity context. Our analysis suggested that plant diversity can substantially add to the milk-production potential yield (per unit of area) in semi-natural grasslands. This creates additional revenues from milk production. Our results showed that these plant diversity benefits can be as high as those from increasing management intensities within semi-natural grassland settings. In a recent comment, Tonn et al. challenged our findings, questioned their applicability for real-life systems and our calculation of the milk-production potential. We argue that their calculation offers a perspective on livestock performance, complementing our perspective of marginal benefits of plant diversity, and it shows that our main results for semi-natural grasslands are robust to differences in assessing milk-production potential yield.