The quest for a mechanistic understanding of biodiversity-ecosystem services relationships.

Clare Duncan,Nathalie Pettorelli,Julian R. Thompson

doi:10.1098/rspb.2015.1348

Clare Duncan, Nathalie Pettorelli + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.1348

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Abstract

Ecosystem services (ES) approaches to biodiversity conservation are currently high on the ecological research and policy agendas. However, despite a wealth of studies into biodiversity's role in maintaining ES (B–ES relationships) across landscapes, we still lack generalities in the nature and strengths of these linkages. Reasons for this are manifold, but can largely be attributed to (i) a lack of adherence to definitions and thus a confusion between final ES and the ecosystem functions (EFs) underpinning them, (ii) a focus on uninformative biodiversity indices and singular hypotheses and (iii) top-down analyses across large spatial scales and overlooking of context-dependency. The biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (B–EF) field provides an alternate context for examining biodiversity's mechanistic role in shaping ES, focusing on species' characteristics that may drive EFs via multiple mechanisms across contexts. Despite acknowledgements of a need for B–ES research to look towards underlying B–EF linkages, the connections between these areas of research remains weak. With this review, we pull together recent B–EF findings to identify key areas for future developments in B–ES research. We highlight a means by which B–ES research may begin to identify how and when multiple underlying B–EF relationships may scale to final ES delivery and trade-offs.

Highlights

In recent decades, conservation science has seen a gradual shift of focus away from traditional ‘fortress conservation’ towards balancing the requirements of both biodiversity and humans [1]
This review aims to bridge this gap, drawing from recent findings and theories from the B–ecosystem functions (EFs) literature to develop a greater mechanistic understanding of B–ecosystem services (ES) relationships, working from the bottom-up and extending linkages between biodiversity and the EFs underlying individual ES to multiple ES delivery across landscapes
We begin by highlighting key areas for concern in current understanding of B–ES; we discuss lessons to be learned from the biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (B–EF) field; we introduce a hierarchical research framework based on combining recent theoretical advances in both fields to enhance the mechanistic basis of current B–ES understanding

Summary

Introduction

Conservation science has seen a gradual shift of focus away from traditional ‘fortress conservation’ towards balancing the requirements of both biodiversity and humans [1]. At least for herbivorous [99] and seeddispersing vertebrates [100], functional redundancy may be low; trait-based assessments of these B–EF relationships are rarely conducted (but see [101]) This is a vital future research area, as interactions across trophic levels are key to promoting EFs [49,54,55]. Rigorous continued multiple B –EF research across a wide range of ecosystem types will further enable comparison of how and when the traits and biodiversity mechanisms promoting them result in synergies and trade-offs in final ES delivery across contexts Such an approach may vastly improve current predictability of ES synergies and trade-offs, and future findings may be compared with those from ES bundles research [15,19,94] to elucidate mechanistic underpinnings of observed B –ES 8 relationships in space

Conclusion

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