Wildlife variety the spice of life
BIODIVERSITY is more than just a pretty face it has an important role in the workings of the living world, claim UK and French scientists.
Results published in Nature this month, demonstrate that numbers of different plants and their types play important roles in ecosystems through their individual characteristics and the ways they interact with one another.
A new analysis of the results of the BIODEPTH (Biodiversity and Ecological Processes in Terrestrial Herbaceous Ecosystems) project, a wide-ranging ecological experiment throughout Europe, presents a novel method and new data representing the latest development in a scientific debate about how the loss of biodiversity affects the way in which ecosystems work.
Plant communities grow better when they consist of teams of species that complement one another, suggesting a new reason to conserve various species, it claims, while the amount of energy turned into plant life the productivity of an ecosystem declines when species are missing.
The BIODEPTH project, consisting of experimental mini-meadows in eight European countries from Greece to Sweden, focused on a variety of plant diversity which imitated the gradual loss of species seen throughout Europe.
Early results showed that harvest yields were higher when a range of plant species was grown together and that complementary interactions between species appeared to play a stronger role than selection effects, where dominance by species with particular traits affects ecosystem processes.
Dr Andy Hector of the NERC centre for population biology, and co-author of the report, Partitioning selection and complementarity in biodiversity experiments, with Professor Michel Loreau of the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, said: "Our research shows biodiversity is not just a pretty face - it can also affect the way the environment works.
"Previous justifications for conserving biodiversity have taken in aesthetic and ethical reasoning: that we like some of it and that it is wrong to let it become extinct.
"Here we suggest, along with the findings of other ecologists, that there is another, complementary reason to preserve diversity it plays a role in determining the way the environment works.
"These results provide the type of general ecological principles that need to be considered when setting conservation and habitat management policy."
For further information check the website: www.cpb.bio.ic.ac.uk/biodepth/contents.html
BIODEPTH Results and Relevance website: www.cpb.bio.ic.ac.uk/biodepth/results_and_relevance.html
*** © Imperial College 2001. This article originally appeared in IC Reporter, the staff newspaper of Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. Please contact the editor Tanya Reed (Email: icreporter@imperial.ac.uk, Telephone: +44 20 7594 6697) for permission to re-use any or all parts of this article.***
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