Trends in Ecology & Evolution
OpinionEnergy Flux: The Link between Multitrophic Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning
Section snippets
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in Complex Systems: Challenges and Prospects
Anthropogenic effects have put unprecedented pressure on global ecosystems [1], which provide crucial goods and services important for human wellbeing [2]. The erosion of biological diversity has prompted concern regarding the provisioning and stability of ecosystem services (see Glossary) 2, 3, substantiated by a large body of empirical research 4, 5. While the foundation of knowledge was built by examining biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning of single trophic levels or simple food
Food Webs Link Biological Diversity, Structure, and Ecosystem Processes
Food-web ecology addresses how biodiversity is organised across trophic levels according to trophic interactions [14], from microscopic autotrophs to carnivorous megafauna. Research in this field has revealed the nonrandom structure of feeding links among species [16] and how this structure is determined and stabilised by a range of factors, such as the distribution of energy fluxes 17, 18 and species traits 19, 20, 21 across interaction networks. These fundamental advances have laid the
Ecological Stoichiometry and Energy Flux
Energy flux in ecological networks characterises the rate of energy flow among nodes, expressing energy consumption by different trophic groups and describing the energetic structure of communities (Figure 1). While this is particularly intriguing for investigating ecological dynamics and processes, researchers might also be interested in how these flows relate to the flux of specific chemical elements. Therefore, while energy flux is often directly related to C flow (as metabolic rates are
Integrating Food Webs, Fluxes, and Ecosystem Functioning
Despite an increasing focus of BEF research on multitrophic systems (primarily on marine food chains 6, 46, 47), there has been very little concentration on systems with high species richness and trophic complexity (Box 2). Because of this, BEF research has not yet been able to directly investigate and define the bioenergetic mechanisms underlying the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in complex, multitrophic systems [33]. Yet, studies that establish whether and how
Linking Food-Web Stability and Ecosystem Function
Food-web research has a long-standing history in tackling the problem of stability in ecological communities 56, 57, initiated and sustained by the question of how diversity and complexity of interaction networks affect their stability [58]. While random interaction networks are intrinsically destabilised by the diversity and complexity of a community, natural food webs are stabilised by nonrandom patterns in their (i) network structure [59]; (ii) distribution of interaction strengths across
Concluding Remarks
For the past two decades, intensive efforts have cemented the central role that biodiversity plays in determining ecosystem functioning. Though the central motivation of BEF experiments was to establish the importance of biodiversity for the integrated performance of ecosystems, trophic complexity has been frequently excluded from many of these studies. Furthermore, the majority of BEF studies (both experimental and observational) have focused on standing-stock biomass, rather than measuring
Acknowledgements
A.D.B, U.B., and N.E. acknowledge support by the German Research Foundation (FZT 118); A.D.B., M.J., C.S., U.B., and N.E. were also supported by the German Research Foundation within the framework of the Jena Experiment (FOR 1451). Further, M.J. was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and N.E. acknowledges funding by the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant 677232, ECOWORM).
Glossary
- Assimilation efficiency
- proportion of total energy ingested by a consumer that is invested into biomass production, reproduction, and respiration, excluding material excreted as waste.
- Ecosystem function
- process carried out in an ecosystem that can be quantified and compared across systems (for example, net primary productivity or herbivory).
- Ecosystem multifunctionality
- measure of the simultaneous provisioning of multiple ecosystem functions.
- Ecosystem service
- property of natural systems, comprised
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