Biodiversity enhances ecosystem reliability

Shahid Naeem () and Shibin Li
Additional contact information
Shahid Naeem: Evolution and Behavior and Center for Community Genetics, University of Minnesota
Shibin Li: Evolution and Behavior and Center for Community Genetics, University of Minnesota

Nature, 1997, vol. 390, issue 6659, 507-509

Abstract: Abstract Biodiversity may represent a form of biological insurance against the loss or poor performance of selected species1. If this is the case, then communities with larger numbers of species should be more predictable with respect to properties such as local biomass2. That is, larger numbers of species should enhance ecosystem reliability, where reliability refers to the probability that a system will provide a consistent level of performance over a given unit of time3. The validity of this hypothesis has important ecological, management and economic implications given the large-scale substitution of diverse natural ecosystems with less diverse managed systems4. No experimental evidence, however, has supported this hypothesis5. To test this hypothesis we established replicated microbial microcosms with varying numbers of species per functional group. We found that as the number of species per functional group increased, replicate communities were more consistent in biomass and density measures. These results suggest that redundancy (in the sense of having multiple species per functional group6,7,8) is a valuable commodity, and that the provision of adequate redundancy may be one reason for preserving biodiversity.

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/37348 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:390:y:1997:i:6659:d:10.1038_37348

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/37348

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().