The biodiversity revolution

The biodiversity revolution

"Just going for species numbers basically doesn't allow us to harness all this incredibly rich information we have of how the real world operates" says Sandra Díaz, an ecologist with Argentina's National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and the University of Có...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature (London) 2017-06, Vol.546 (7656), p.22
Main Author: Cernansky, Rachel
Format: Article
Language:eng
Subjects:
Biodiversity
Consortia
Ecologists
Ecology
Ecosystems
Food chains
Food webs
Forests
Land use
Microcosms
Microorganisms
Nitrogen fixation
Nitrogenation
Photosynthesis
Soil microorganisms
Soils
Spatial data
Species diversity
Sustainability
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Summary:"Just going for species numbers basically doesn't allow us to harness all this incredibly rich information we have of how the real world operates" says Sandra Díaz, an ecologist with Argentina's National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and the University of Córdoba. How traits are defined remains a source of debate, and without robust data on trait and species diversity in settings around the world, any choices directed by the approach could turn out to be short-sighted. Here, the presence of certain traits, such as the C4 photosynthesis pathway or nitrogen fixation, made a bigger difference to the plots' overall health than the number of species. Around the same time, Shahid Naeem, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability in New York City, was also looking beyond species numbers to study ecosystem function, zeroing in on the diversity of species at different levels of the food web. Diana Wall, a soil ecologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, says that she and her colleagues have focused on functional traits and diversity for years, in part because the activities of soil microorganisms are often easier to identify than the species themselves. A large German consortium has been studying how land-use intensification affects functional diversity, and more work needs to be done on the role of spatial data and interactions at the landscape level, rather than in microcosms or individual study sites.
ISSN:0028-0836
1476-4687