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Ecology

Be diverse, be predictable

Nature volume 390, pages 440–441 (1997)Cite this article

One of the grand challenges of ecology is the prediction of the variability in the sizes of populations, in the species composition of communities, and in the function of ecosystems. How much this variability is affected by biodiversity — and by which kind of biodiversity — has remained especially contentious, and the political debate about biodiversity has attached extra weight to this.

Previous studies on grassland plant communities3,4 and an experimental multitrophic-level community5 were thought to show how productivity increases with species richness. Subsequent analyses6 suggested that what matters most is the diversity of functional groups, with species number per functional group being less important. Similarly, McGrady-Steed et al. found a substantial initial increase in production of carbon dioxide with increasing species number, but no further increase beyond an intermediate level of species richness. Just as with the grassland communities6, this probably reflects the importance of having the right mix of functional groups for average ecosystem performance. The new twist in McGrady-Steed and colleagues' experimental results is that variability among replicates, and variability in time, decreased across the full range of species richnesses studied. Encouragingly, a re-analysis2 of the previous studies4,5 gave a similar result.

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Figure 1: Community life on a small scale — microbial microcosms, similar to those used by Naeem and Li1.

SHAHID NAEEM, UNIV. MINNESOTA

References

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  1. the Department of Ecology and Systematics, University of Helsinki, PO Box 17, Helsinki, 00014, Finland

    Ilkka Hanski

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  1. Ilkka Hanski
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Hanski, I. Be diverse, be predictable. Nature 390, 440–441 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/37222

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