Review
Biodiversity and Resilience of Ecosystem Functions

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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.

Section snippets

The Importance of Resilience

Across the globe, conservation efforts have not managed to alleviate biodiversity loss [1], and this will ultimately impact many functions delivered by ecosystems 2, 3. To aid environmental management in the face of conflicting land-use pressures, there is an urgent need to quantify and predict the spatial and temporal distribution of ecosystem functions and services (see Glossary) 4, 5, 6. Progress is being made in this area, but a serious issue is that monitoring and modeling the delivery of

Defining and Applying the Resilience Concept

Resilience is a concept with numerous definitions in ecological [19], social [20], and other sciences [21]. In ecology, an initial focus on the stability of ecosystem processes and the speed with which they return to an equilibrium state following disturbance (recovery or ‘engineering resilience’ [22]) has gradually been replaced by a broader concept of ‘ecological resilience’ recognizing multiple stable states and the ability for systems to resist regime shifts and maintain functions,

Threats to Ecosystem Functions

Environmental change is not unusual (ecosystems have always faced periodic and persistent changes), but anthropogenic activity (e.g., land conversion, carbon emissions, nitrogen cycle disruption, species introductions) is now increasing both the rate and the intensity of environmental change to previously unprecedented levels 36, 37, 38. Rapid changes to the abiotic environment might alter local and regional species pools through environmental filtering and disrupting biotic interactions,

Mechanisms Underpinning Resilient Ecosystem Functions

Previous studies have attempted to identify the characteristics of resilient systems from a broad socioeconomic perspective 20, 21, but here we focus on the biological underpinnings of the resilience of ecosystem functions, to inform targeted environmental management practices. The resilience of ecosystem functions to environmental change is likely to be determined by multiple factors acting at various levels of biological organization; namely, species, communities, and landscapes (Table 1).

Applied Ecosystem Management

Ecosystem services are beginning to be integrated within major land-management programs (e.g., the EU Common Agricultural Policy, REDD+). However, the measurement, monitoring, and direct management of ecosystem function resilience in these programs is lacking [92]. The ecological theory and empirical evidence discussed above suggest that multiple factors will determine ecosystem resilience. However, we do not yet know which will be the most important in determining resilience in particular

Concluding Remarks

In this review we have highlighted mechanisms by which biodiversity, at different hierarchical scales, can influence the resilience of ecosystem functions. We hope that a focus on resilience rather than short-term delivery of ecosystem functions and services, and the consideration of specific underpinning mechanisms, will help to join the research areas of biodiversity–ecosystem function and ecological resilience and ultimately aid the development of evidence-based yet flexible ecosystem

Acknowledgments

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers and Volker Grimm for comments and discussion that helped to improve the manuscript. The review forms part of the output from the Tansley Working Groups initiative sponsored by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) (http://www.nerc.ac.uk/). A series of workshops leading to the review were held at Imperial College London. T.H.O. was supported by the Wessex Biodiversity Ecosystem Services Sustainability (BESS) project within the NERC BESS

Glossary

Alternative stable states
when an ecosystem has more than one stable state (e.g., community structure) for a particular set of environmental conditions. These states can differ in the levels of specific ecosystem functions.
Beta diversity
variation in the composition of species communities across locations.
(Demographic) Allee effects
where small populations exhibit very slow or negative growth contrary to the rapid growth usually expected. Explanations range from an inability to find mates or avoid

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