Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in naturally assembled communities

Approximately 25 years ago, ecologists became increasingly interested in the question of whether ongoing biodiversity loss matters for the functioning of ecosystems. As such, a new ecological subfield on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning (BEF) was born. This subfield was initially dominated by theoretical studies and by experiments in which biodiversity was manipulated, and responses of ecosystem functions such as biomass production, decomposition rates, carbon sequestration, trophic interactions and pollination were assessed. More recently, an increasing number of studies have investigated BEF relationships in non‐manipulated ecosystems, but reviews synthesizing our knowledge on the importance of real‐world biodiversity are still largely missing.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Biological Reviews of The Cambridge Philosophical Society

• Publication date

  2019-02-06

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/brv.12499PMID 30724447
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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