Marine biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: what’s known and what’s next?
By Lars Gamfeldt, J. Lefcheck, Jarrett E. K. Byrnes, B. Cardinale, J. Emmett Duffy, J. Griffin. 2015
258 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Marine ecosystems are experiencing rapid and pervasive changes in biodiversity and species composition. Understanding the ecosystem consequences of these changes is critical to effectively managing these systems. Over the last several years, numerous experimental manipulations of species richness have been performed, yet existing quantitative syntheses have focused on a just a subset of processes measured in experiments and, as such, have not summarized the full data available from marine systems. Here, we present the results of a meta-analysis of 110 marine experiments from 42 studies that manipulated the species richness of organisms across a range of taxa and trophic levels and analysed the consequences for various ecosystem processes (categorised as production, consumption or biogeochemical fluxes). Our results show that, generally, mixtures of species tend to enhance levels of ecosystem function relative to the average component species in monoculture, but have no effect or a negative effect on functioning relative to the ‘highest- performing’ species. These results are largely consistent with those from other syntheses, and extend conclusions to ecological functions that are commonly measured in the marine realm (e.g. nutrient release from sediment bioturbation). For experiments that manipulated three or more levels of richness, we attempted to discern the functional form of the biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationship. We found that, for response variables related to consumption, a power-function best described the relationship, which is also consistent with previous findings. However, we identified a linear relationship between richness and production. Combined, our results suggest that changes in the number of species will, on average, tend to alter the functioning of marine ecosystems. We outline several research frontiers that will allow us to more fully understand how, why, and when diversity may drive the functioning of marine ecosystems. Synthesis The oceans host an incredible number and variety of species. However, human activities are driving rapid changes in the marine environment. It is imperative we understand ecosystem consequences of any associated loss of species. We summarized data from 110 experiments that manipulated species diversity and evaluated resulting changes to a range of ecosystem responses. We show that losing species, on average, decreases productivity, growth, and a myriad of other processes related to how marine organisms capture and utilize resources. Finally, we suggest that the loss of species may have stronger consequences for some processes than others.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9c9afad815a241411d2dd9b7235ad3028db4bce
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Citations in the corpus
- Marine biodiversity and ecosystem function relationships: The potential for practical monitoring applications (2015, unknown): “…is a general consensus that marine biodiversity and ecosystem function relationships do exist, and positive and negative effects of biodiversity have been observed in several marine ecosystem functions (Worm et al., 2006; Stachowicz et al., 2007; Cardinale et al., 2012; Gamfeldt et al., 2014).”
- Impacts of marine and freshwater aquaculture on wildlife: a global meta-analysis (2018, background): “Even in the absence of an ecological trap, changes in the abundance and spatial distribution of influential species may indirectly affect other species and drive large-scale shifts in biodiversity and ecosystem function (Gamfeldt et al. 2015).”
- A trait-based approach to ocean ecology (2018, background): “production, biomass) (Cardinale et al., 2012; Gamfeldt et al., 2015), because ecosystem function may relate to trait diversity rather than to species diversity (Cadotte et al.”
- Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in naturally assembled communities (2019, background): “Furthermore, a meta-analysis of marine biodiversity experiments revealed that secondary biomass production increases with herbivore diversity (Gamfeldt et al., 2015).”