Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning

The biological composition and richness of most of the Earth's major ecosystems are being dramatically and irreversibly transformed by anthropogenic activity. Yet, despite the vast areal extent of our oceans, the mainstay of research to-date in the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning arena has been weighted towards ecological observations and experimentation in terrestrial plant and soil systems. This book provides a framework for extending these concepts to a variety of marine systems. Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning is the first book to address the latest advances in biodiversity-function science using marine examples. It brings together contributions from the leading scientists in the field to provide an in-depth evaluation of the science, before offering a perspective on future research directions for some of the most pressing environmental issues facing society today and in the future. I will highly recommend this book in its entirety to students, perticularly at postgraduate level, as well as researchers and practitioners with an interest and background in the field. This book covers all you ever needed and/or wanted to know about biodiversity, and more specifically about the relationship between diversity and how the ecosystem functions in the marine environment.1. Marine biodiversity: its history, present status and future threats ; 2. Biodiversity in the context of ecosystem function ; 3. Ecosystem function and co-evolution of terminology in marine science and management ; 4. Ecological consequences of declining biodiversity: A biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) framework for marine systems ; 5. Lessons from the fossil record: the Ediacaran radiation, the Cambrian radiation, and the end-Permian mass extinction ; 6. The analysis of biodiversity-ecosystem function experiments: partitioning richness and density-dependent effects ; 7. The importance of body size, abundance, and food web structure for ecosystem functioning ; 8. Effects of biodiversity-environment conditions on the interpretation of biodiversity-function relations ; 9. Extending the approaches of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning to the deep ocean ; 10. Incorporating extinction risk and realistic biodiversity futures: Implementation of trait based extinction scenarios ; 11. Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: an ecosystem-level approach ; 12. Multitrophic biodiversity and the responses of marine ecosystems to global change ; 13. Reality check: issues of scale and abstraction in biodiversity research, and potential solutions ; 14. Why bother going outside: the role of observational studies in understanding biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships ; 15. Implementing an ecosystem approach: predicting and safeguarding marine biodiversity futures ; Index