Biodiversity and the stability of ecosystem functioning.

By John Griffin, Eoin J. O’Gorman, M. Emmerson, Stuart R. Jenkins, Alexandra-Maria Klein, Michel Loreau, A. Symstad. 2009

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Concern that the rapid anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity (Wilson 1992) may undermine the delivery of ecosystem services (Daily 1997) has prompted a synthesis of community and ecosystem ecology over the last decade. Biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) research is central to this emerging synthesis, asking how biodiversity is related to the magnitude and stability of ecosystem processes. Isolating species richness (and diversity) effects from species composition has been a chief goal of BEF research. That species richness generally enhances the mean magnitude of a variety of ecosystem properties is nowwell established (Hooper et al. 2005; Balvanera et al. 2006; Cardinale et al. 2006a), but the effect of species richness on the stability of ecosystem properties remains equivocal (Hooper et al. 2005). Early consensus (Odum 1953, MacArthur 1955, Elton 1958, Pimentel 1961) that diversity enhances various aspects of community and ecosystem stability was largely founded on qualitative observations and intuitive reasoning. This view was apparently contradicted by the results from rigorous mathematical treatments (e.g. May 1972) which showed that in a food web context stability was related to system properties, i.e. connectance, species richness, and interaction strength, and importantly, could be reduced by species richness. Recognition that stability has multiple definitions that can apply to all levels of ecological organization (Pimm 1984; see also Loreau et al. 2002) helped pave the way for a new, synthetic perspective that developed during the 1990s as attention to extinction’s consequences for the stability of ecosystem functioning increased (Tilman and Downing 1994, Naeem and Li 1997). This BEF perspective recognized that fluctuating abundances of component species may not produce instability at the community or ecosystem level because compensatory reactions among species dampenfluctuations of aggregate abundance (Tilman 1996). The distinction between population and community-level variability was firmly drawn (Tilman 1996) and attention was focused on the latter through the BEF research agenda. Within the BEF framework, experiments and theory explicitly relating to the effect of species richness on community-level aggregate properties (mainly biomass) have focused on variability through time in relation to background environmental variation (temporal stability) as well as on the impact (resistance) and recovery (resilience) of such properties to discrete, and often extreme, perturbations. In this chapter we review recent empirical studies examining the links between species richness and these three facets of stability (see Ives and Carpenter 2007 for a review of other types of stability). In addition, recognizing that explicit BEF experiments are limited in their spatial and temporal scope, we adopt a wider perspective by discussing how changes in biodiversity may undermine stabilizing properties of food webs and the ability of ecosystems to resist state-changes. Furthermore, using examples we emphasize that direct measurement of the stability of ecosystem services across gradients of human impacts can show how stability is influenced by human

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

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Citations in the corpus

Integrating ecological, economic and social aspects to generate useful management information under the EU Directives' ‘ecosystem approach’ (2012, background): “The interactions among biodiversity assets, ecosystem processes and functioning (BEF), and the services provided by natural or production systems has been widely studied over the years (e.g. Duarte, 2000; Griffin et al., 2009; Naeemet al., 2009).”
Landscape moderation of biodiversity patterns and processes ‐ eight hypotheses (2012, background): “…environments According to the insurance hypothesis, higher biodiversity in a functional group buffers ecosystem functioning against environmental changes (Lawton & Brown, 1994; Naeem & Li, 1997; Yachi & Loreau, 1999; Loreau, Mouquet & Gonzalez, 2003; Winfree et al., 2007; Griffin et al., 2009).”