Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning: Basic Principles
نویسنده
چکیده
Since the mid 1990s, ecologists have intensified their efforts to describe and quantify the effects that biodiversity can exert on the various processes within ecosystems. Both theoretical and experimental work has shown that within a habitat, changing diversity has profound effects on biomass production, nutrient retention, and other ecosystem characteristics such as stability. In most experiments, a positive relationship between plant diversity and productivity has been found, while the level of unconsumed resources was inversely related to diversity. The diversity of functional groups in general had more pronounced effects than the number of species, emphasizing the importance of functional traits of species. As underlying mechanisms, niche differentiation leading to complementary resource use, facilitative interactions among species, and probabilistic sampling effects have been identified. For management or conservation purposes, it is crucial to distinguish results obtained from within-habitat manipulative experiments, from those of observational studies comparing across-habitat patterns of diversity and ecosystem functioning. As the understanding of the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationship progresses, conservation and management will more and more benefit from these basic insights into how communities and ecosystems function.
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Quantifying effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning across times and places.
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