Consequences of climate-driven biodiversity changes for ecosystem functioning of North European rocky shores

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning

Species diversity is a major determinant of ecosystem productivity, stability, invasibility, and nutrient dynamics. Hundreds of studies spanning terrestrial, aquatic, and marine ecosystems show that high-diversity mixtures are approximately twice as productive as monocultures of the same species and that this difference increases through time. These impacts of higher diversity have multiple cau...

Whole-Community Facilitation Regulates Biodiversity on Patagonian Rocky Shores

BACKGROUND Understanding the factors that generate and maintain biodiversity is a central goal in ecology. While positive species interactions (i.e., facilitation) have historically been underemphasized in ecological research, they are increasingly recognized as playing important roles in the evolution and maintenance of biodiversity. Dominant habitat-forming species (foundation species) buffer...

Functional consequences of realistic biodiversity changes in a marine ecosystem.

Declines in biodiversity have prompted concern over the consequences of species loss for the goods and services provided by natural ecosystems. However, relatively few studies have evaluated the functional consequences of realistic, nonrandom changes in biodiversity. Instead, most designs have used randomly selected assemblages from a local species pool to construct diversity gradients. It is t...

Predation by Crabs on Rocky Shores in North-east Atlantic

Consequences of tropical land use for multitrophic biodiversity and ecosystem functioning

Our knowledge about land-use impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is mostly limited to single trophic levels, leaving us uncertain about whole-community biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships. We analyse consequences of the globally important land-use transformation from tropical forests to oil palm plantations. Species diversity, density and biomass of invertebrate commu...