Volume 30, Issue 11, November 2015, Pages 673–684
Review
- 1 School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AH, UK
- 2 NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, UK
- 3 Joint Nature Conservation Committee, UK
- 4 University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
- 5 University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
- 6 Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
- 7 Imperial College London, London, UK
- 8 Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- 9 Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
- 10 University of York, York, UK
- 11 Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
- 12 University College London, London, UK
- 13 Social-Ecological Systems Laboratory, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
- 14 Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
- Available online 1 October 2015
Accelerating
rates of environmental change and the continued loss of global
biodiversity threaten functions and services delivered by ecosystems.
Much ecosystem monitoring and management is focused on the provision of
ecosystem functions and services under current environmental conditions,
yet this could lead to inappropriate management guidance and
undervaluation of the importance of biodiversity. The maintenance of
ecosystem functions and services under substantial predicted future
environmental change (i.e., their ‘resilience’) is crucial. Here we
identify a range of mechanisms underpinning the resilience of ecosystem
functions across three ecological scales. Although potentially less
important in the short term, biodiversity, encompassing variation from
within species to across landscapes, may be crucial for the longer-term
resilience of ecosystem functions and the services that they underpin.
Keywords
- ecosystem services;
- functional diversity;
- recovery;
- redundancy;
- resistance;
- risk
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
