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Ecology

Power behind diversity's throne

Nature volume 401, pages 653–654 (1999)Cite this article

On average, plants contain less than half a gram of carbon per square centimetre. Yet this thin veneer of living matter, a sort of ‘green slime’ sandwiched between a 100-km-deep lithosphere and a 100-km-high atmosphere, manages to cycle 60 gigatonnes (60×1015 g) of carbon per year between the biosphere, lithosphere and atmosphere1. Clearly, the Earth's biota has a staggering capability to affect our environment. But this perspective overlooks a critical feature of plant life; this green slime consists of more than a quarter of a million species. What, if any, is the role of such extraordinary diversity? Is it important to the rates of ecosystem processes? Is it important to the stability of ecosystems? We must answer these questions if we are to understand how widespread losses in biodiversity2 are likely to affect ecosystem properties and the services they provide3. A rapidly growing body of ecological research deals with this issue, and considerable excitement and controversy surround its findings4. However, on page 691 Sankaran and McNaughton5 present results from a very different kind of study that challenges both the nature and the direction of this new field.

Although ranging widely in character and design6 — from small bottles of microbes7 to the BIODEPTH experiments that span nine European countries — the flurry of recent experimental work on the role of biodiversity in ecosystem processes has centred on a single line of investigation. Diversity has been manipulated by constructing replicate ecosystems in which some species are excluded from some replicates. This mimics the biodiversity loss that might arise because of stochastic processes, habitat modification, overexploitation, displacement by invasive species or other processes that result in the local extirpation of species8.

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  1. the Department of Zoology, University of Washington, Seattle, 98195, Washington, USA

    Shahid Naeem

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  1. Shahid Naeem
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Correspondence to Shahid Naeem.

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Naeem, S. Power behind diversity's throne. Nature 401, 653–654 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/44297

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