M Loreau

..Identifying and separating out the mechanisms behind ecosystem responses to biodiversity should become the focus of future experiments...

..This creates a tension between the effects of plant diversity and microbial diversity on ecosystem functioning, which may explain some recent experimental results...

..In contrast, the complementarity effect is positive overall, supporting the hypothesis that plant diversity influences primary production in European grasslands through niche differentiation or facilitation...

..A major future challenge is to determine how biodiversity dynamics, ecosystem processes, and abiotic factors interact...

..Our analysis emphasizes the need for integration of population, community, and ecosystem perspectives in ecology and the critical consequences of assuming closed versus open systems...

..Knowledge of spatial processes across ecosystems is critical to predict the effects of landscape changes on both biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and services...

..We discuss how community structure constrains assembly rules and yields cascades of extinctions in food webs...

..Despite the complexity generated by trophic interactions, biodiversity should still act as biological insurance for ecosystem processes, except when mean trophic interaction strength increases strongly with diversity...

..5. Density-dependent dispersal suggests that regional processes depend on local community dynamics. We discuss the potential consequences of density-dependent dispersal on metacommunity dynamics and stability...

..Nontrophic interactions alter the shape of the relationship between biodiversity and biomass and can profoundly influence ecosystem processes...

..Our analysis demonstrates that food-web structure can profoundly influence ecosystem properties...

..This stresses the need for experimental data on phenotypic traits, their costs and their influence on the interactions between organisms and the rest of the community...

..This emphasizes the importance of including explicit nutrient dynamics in studies of plant-herbivore coevolution...

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..They also suggest that detrital chains play an important role in determining plant nutrient limitation in many ecosystems...

..Thus, the functional diversity of pollination networks may be critical to ecosystem sustainability...

..Variations of two key parameters (width of consumption niche and competition intensity) allow very different food-web structures and functionings to emerge, which are similar to those observed in some of the best-documented food webs...

..We discuss the functional and evolutionary implications of these results, and suggest that the traditional dichotomy describing antagonistic and mutualistic interactions may be misleading...

..We expect our predictions to be useful in explaining the community structure of decomposers and their interactions with other consumers of inorganic resources, particularly primary producers...

..Our results provide a niche-based alternative to the recent neutral-metacommunity model and have important implications for conservation biology and landscape management...

..We propose an operational measure of light-use complementarity using empirical field data on light absorption to test the presence of complementarity in natural plant communities...

..Moreover, for arid ecosystems where local facilitation is a driving process, vegetation patchiness indicates proximity to a transition point, but does not allow distinguishing between continuous and discontinuous transitions...

..In this case, adaptation in response to climate change and human pressures could give the final push to the desertification of arid ecosystems...

..Comparing the observed synchrony of species per capita population growth rates with that predicted by the neutral model potentially provides a simple test of deterministic asynchrony in a community...

..Analyses of deep-sea ecosystems challenge this generalisation and suggest that positive species interactions might be more widespread than previously believed...

..The direct benefit accruing to plants, however, plays a crucial role in the evolutionary advantage of niche construction...

..Our results suggest that experiments to date have, if anything, underestimated the impacts of species extinction on the productivity of ecosystems...

..Understanding how biodiversity affects functioning of complex ecosystems will benefit from integrating theory and experiments with simulations and network-based approaches...

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..Our model emphasizes the importance of considering the influence of body size on species interactions in attempting to explain large-scale patterns related to body size...

..Furthermore, dispersal has its own scales. Thorough empirical tests of neutral models will require both tests of mechanisms and pattern-producing ability, and will involve coupling theoretical models and experiments...