The study of global environmental change and its effect on biodiversity and ecosystem function is at an exciting crossroads, at which ideas developed largely through theory and small-scale experiments are now being tested with ecosystem services as they are delivered to people in real-world landscapes. Pollinators and pollination are emerging as a model system for exploring these questions, whi...

Understanding the link between microbial diversity and ecosystem processes is a fundamental goal of microbial ecologists, yet we still have a rudimentary knowledge of how changes in diversity affect nutrient cycling and energy transfer in ecosystems. Due to the complexity of the problem, many published studies on this topic have been conducted in artificial or manipulated systems. Studies of ar...

Biogeosciences Discussions This discussion paper is/has been under review for the journal Biogeosciences (BG). Please refer to the corresponding final paper in BG if available. Abstract Alongside a primary productivity gradient between the Galicia Bank region in the northeast Atlantic and the more oligotrophic eastern Mediterranean basin, we investigated the bathymetric (1200–3000 m) and longit...

Many studies have demonstrated that pathogens can have strong effects on the per for mance of individual organisms, population dynamics, and community interactions. A more limited set of studies suggests that pathogens can alter a wide range of ecosystem functions in terrestrial systems; however, we are lacking a framework to predict the type and magnitude of ecosystem effects that a given path...

Detrital subsidies from marine macrophytes are prevalent in temperate estuaries, and their role in structuring benthic macrofaunal communities is well documented, but the resulting impact on ecosystem function is not understood. We conducted a field experiment to test the effects of detrital decay on soft-sediment primary production, community metabolism and nutrient regeneration (measures of e...

The ever increasing pile-up of electronic waste in dumping sites, especially in developing countries such as China, Pakistan, India and several African countries, might have caused a significant alteration in the microbial community of the contaminated sites. This change in the microbial population may have significant impact to the soil ecology function. The major pollutants of electronic wast...

The shrinking Baiyangdian Lake and drying up rivers are widely observed in recent years. Due to the significant advantages in integrated analyses of natural and economic systems, emergy analysis is introduced in this paper to assess the health status of Baiyangdian Watershed. First, we establish a emergy based conceptual framework for the assessment, delineate an emergy flow diagram of Baiyangd...

Changing environmental conditions are affecting diversity and ecosystem function globally. Theory suggests that dispersal from a regional species pool may buffer against changes in local community diversity and ecosystem function after a disturbance through the establishment of functionally redundant tolerant species. The spatial insurance provided by dispersal may decrease through time after e...

Biodiversity-ecosystem functioning experiments have established that species richness and composition are both important determinants of ecosystem function in an experimental context. Determining whether this result holds for real-world ecosystem services has remained elusive, however, largely due to the lack of analytical methods appropriate for large-scale, associational data. Here, we use a ...