Biodiversity, Ecosystem Functioning, and Human Wellbeing ─ An Ecological and Economic Perspective

How will biodiversity loss affect ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services, and human well-being?

In an age of accelerating biodiversity loss, this timely and critical volume summarizes recent advances in biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research and explores the economics of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The book starts by summarizing the development of the basic science and provides a meta-analysis that quantitatively tests several biodiversity and ecosystem functioning hypotheses. It then describes the natural science foundations of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research including: quantifying functional diversity, the development of the field into a predictive science, the effects of stability and complexity, methods to quantify mechanisms by which diversity affects functioning, the importance of trophic structure, microbial ecology, and spatial dynamics. Finally, the book takes research on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning further than it has ever gone into the human dimension, describing the most pressing environmental challenges that face humanity and the effects of diversity on: climate change mitigation, restoration of degraded habitats, managed ecosystems, pollination, disease, and biological invasions.

However, what makes this volume truly unique are the chapters that consider the economic perspective. These include a synthesis of the economics of ecosystem services and biodiversity, and the options open to policy-makers to address the failure of markets to account for the loss of ecosystem services; an examination of the challenges of valuing ecosystem services and, hence, to understanding the human consequences of decisions that neglect these services; and an examination of the ways in which economists are currently incorporating biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research into decision models for the conservation and management of biodiversity. A final section describes new advances in ecoinformatics that will help transform this field into a globally predictive science, and summarizes the advancements and future directions of the field. The ultimate conclusion is that biodiversity is an essential element of any strategy for sustainable development.

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 and co-chaired the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Biodiversity Synthesis Report (Duraiappah and Naeem 2005).

Daniel Bunker is an Assistant Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, New Jersey, USA). Dr. Bunker is also co-director of the BioMERGE project and the TraitNet project. He focuses on understanding the effects of global climate change on species diversity and composition, and the concomitant effects of ecosystem functioning and services.

Andy Hector is a community ecologist interested in the links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. 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 and the Silver Medal of the National Centre for Scientific Research (France), and has been a member of numerous national and international scientific committees such as chairing the Scientific Committee of DIVERSITAS and the Steering Committee of the European Science Foundation programme (LINKECOL).

Charles Perrings is Professor of Environmental Economics in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He has served as President of the International Society for Ecological Economics and as Vice Chair of the Scientific Committee of Diversitas. He is also the 2008 winner of the Kenneth E. Boulding Prize for ecological economics.