Research of the past decades has shown that biodiversity promotes ecosystem functions including primary productivity. However, most studies focused on experimental communities at small spatial scales, and little is known about how these findings scale to nonexperimental, real-world ecosystems at large spatial scales, despite these systems providing essential ecosystem services to humans. Here, we show that primary productivity, its temporal stability, and the decadal trend of a prolonged growing season strongly increase with biodiversity across heterogeneous landscapes, which is consistent over vast environmental, climatic, and altitudinal gradients. Our findings thus underline the critical role biodiversity plays for ecosystem functioning and responses to environmental change in heterogeneous, real-world ecosystems at the landscape scale.

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