Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning

By M. Kinnison, S. Strauss, Trevon L. Fuller, Scott P Carroll, D. Richardson, K. Hondula, B. Koch. Community Ecology, 2019

565 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This chapter examines the relationship between biodiversity (most often measured as species richness) and the functioning of ecosystems. Examined in detail are the effects of biodiversity on: ecosystem productivity, nutrient use and nutrient retention, community and ecosystem stability, and invasibility by exotic species. A careful look, over two decades, at experimental results and meta-analyses confirms the positive impact of species richness on productivity, ecosystem stability, and nutrient retention. Thus, we can confidently conclude that biodiversity matters to the healthy functioning of ecosystems, although we do not yet know how many species are needed to ensure the successful functioning of any given ecosystem. The chapter concludes with a discussion of six important, but unanswered question in the study of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86f7b76db82aec3833547cf7301d8235170b95a8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning in a 15-year grassland experiment: Patterns, mechanisms, and open questions (2017, background): “…on summarizing the evidence for an effect of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning, rather than on describing in detail the response of an ecosystem to a manipulation of plant diversity (Hooper et al. 2005; Balvanera et al. 2006; Cardinale et al. 2012; Naeem et al. 2012; Tilman et al. 2014).”
Plant functional diversity modulates global environmental change effects on grassland productivity (2018, methodology): “This intuitively appealing idea has received considerable support from BEF experiments, including those that manipulated functional group richness (e.g. Tilman et al., 1997) and those that considered continuous measures of function trait distribution (e.g. Petchey, Hector, & Gaston, 2004).”
Impacts of Invasive Species on Food Webs: A Review of Empirical Data (2017, background): “However, current evidence might be biased towards observations of spectacular effects (Section 4.3). communities generally support this prediction (Tilman et al., 2014).”