Biodiversity, Ecosystem Functioning, and Human Wellbeing

• Preface


• Introduction, Background, and Meta-analyses


• 1: Shahid Naeem, Daniel E. Bunker, Andy Hector, Michel Loreau, Charles Perrings: Introduction: The Ecological and Social Implications of Changing Biodiversity: An overview of a decade of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research


• 2: Bernhard Schmid, Patricia Balvanera, Bradley J. Cardinale, Jasmin Godbold, Andrea B. Pfisterer, David Raffaelli, Martin Solan, Diane S. Srivastava: Consequences of Species Loss for Ecosystem Functioning: Meta-analyses of data from biodiversity experiments


• 3: Martin Solan, Jasmin A. Godbold, Amy Symstad, Dan F.B. Flynn, Daniel E. Bunker: Biodiversity-ecosystem Function Research and Biodiversity Futures: Early bird catches the worm or a day late and a dollar short?


• Natural Science Foundations


• 4: Owen L Petchey, Eoin O'Gorman, Dan F.B. Flynn: A Functional Guide to Functional Diversity Measures


• 5: J. Emmett Duffy, Diane S. Srivastava, Jennie McLaren, Mahesh Sankaran, Martin Solan, John Griffin, Mark Emmerson, Kate E. Jones: Forecasting Decline in Ecosystem Services Under Realistic Scenarios of Extinction


• 6: John Griffin, Eoin O'Gorman, Mark Emmerson, Stuart Jenkins, Alexandra-Maria Klein, Michel Loreau, Amy Symstad: Biodiversity and the Stability of Ecosystem Functioning


• 7: Andy Hector, Thomas Bell, John Connolly, John Finn, Jeremy Fox, Laura Kirwan, Michel Loreau, Jennie McLaren, Bernhard Schmid, Alexandra Weigelt: The Analysis of Biodiversity Experiments: From pattern toward mechanism


• 8: Bradley J. Cardinale, J. Emmett Duffy, Diane S. Srivastava, Michel Loreau, Matthew Thomas, Mark Emmerson: Towards a Food-web Perspective on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning

Shahid Naeem is Professor of Ecology and Chair, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, Columbia University. Dr. Naeem pioneered experimental tests of the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem function (Naeem et al. 1994) and has been a leader in the field. He co-chaired the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Biodiversity Synthesis Report (Duraiappah and Naeem 2005), co-edited Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning: Synthesis and Perspectives (Loreau et al. 2002) and has published more that 50 peer-reviewed research papers.


Daniel Bunker is an Assistant Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, New Jersey, USA). Dr. Bunker in co-director of the BioMERGE project and the TraitNet project. Dr. Bunker focuses on understanding the effects of global climate change on species diversity and composition, and the concomitant effects on ecosystem functioning and services. Additional research foci include functional diversity, trait based ecology, and ecoinformatics.


Andy Hector is a community ecologist interested in the links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Andy gained a BSc. (Honours) in Natural Environmental Science from the University of Sheffield in 1991 and received his PhD from Imperial College London in 1996. He did his first post-doc as scientific coordinator of the BIODEPTH project and later held research fellowships at the Centre for Population Biology funded by NERC and the Royal Society. In 2003 he was appointed Assistant Professor within the Institute of Environmental Sciences at the University of Zurich where he is currently undergoing tenure review for a full Professorship.

Michel Loreau is Full Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in theoretical ecology at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). He has won several scientific prizes, including the International Ecology Institute Prize, the Silver Medal of the National Centre for Scientific Research (France), and the Agathon De Potter and Max

A very useful volume to anyone interested in ecosystem functionality. Bulletin of the British Ecological Society