The ecological consequences of biodiversity loss

Biodiversity and ecosystems

The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning has emerged as a central theme in environmental sciences during the past two decades. Recent theoretical and experimental work has established that horizontal diversity at any trophic level enhances the productivity of that trophic level because functional complementarity among different phenotypes leads to better collective resource use.

Horizontal diversity has also been showed to act as biological insurance in the long run, stabilising ecosystem processes in the face of environmental changes. There is a strong connection between the ecological mechanisms that maintain species diversity in a community and the ecological consequences of this diversity for ecosystem functioning. Paradoxically, the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning provide perhaps the strongest evidence to date for modern niche theory. The magnitude and complexity of these effects, however, are still strongly underestimated by current knowledge based on simple systems and single ecosystem processes.

Ecological consequences of biodiversity loss

Interactions between multiple trophic levels and multiple ecosystem processes are expected to make the functional consequences of biodiversity loss stronger and more complex. Therefore, future changes in biodiversity are likely to result in major alterations in ecosystem services, with potentially considerable social and economic implications for human societies.

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Speaker: Michel Loreau