Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning: Current Knowledge and Future Challenges

Abstract

The ecological consequences of biodiversity loss have aroused considerable interest and controversy during the past decade. Major advances have been made in describing the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem processes, in identifying functionally important species, and in revealing underlying mechanisms. There is, however, uncertainty as to how results obtained in recent experiments scale up to landscape and regional levels and generalize across ecosystem types and processes. Larger numbers of species are probably needed to reduce temporal variability in ecosystem processes in changing environments. A major future challenge is to determine how biodiversity dynamics, ecosystem processes, and abiotic factors interact.

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Affiliated Institutions

• Imperial College London GB
• Western Washington University US
• University of Minnesota US
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory US
• University of Washington US
• University of York GB
• University of Zurich CH
• Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences SE
• University of Sheffield GB
• École Normale Supérieure - PSL FR

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