  We demonstrate that the issues described in the Wagg et al. (2019) Comment on
our paper (Pillai and Gouhier, 2019) are all due to misunderstandings about the
implications of pairwise effects, the nature of the null baseline in both our
framework and in the Loreau-Hector (LH) partitioning scheme (i.e., the midpoint
of the monocultures), and the impact of nonlinearity on the LH partitioning
results. Specifically, we show that (i) pairwise effects can be computed over
any time horizon and thus do not imply stable coexistence, (ii) the midpoint of
the monocultures corresponds to a neutral community so coexistence was always
part of the LH baseline, and (iii) contrary to what Wagg et al. suggested,
generalized diversity-interaction models do not account for (and may in fact
exacerbate) the problem of nonlinearity in monocultures, which inflates the LH
net biodiversity effect and generates incorrect estimates of selection and
complementarity. Hence, all of our original claims about the triviality
inherent in biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research and the issues with the
LH partitioning scheme hold.
