Biodiversity, a fancy word for the collection of life on Earth, has far-reaching effects, from the largest cities to remote, rural communities, and is key to our planet’s overall existence. Now a team of scholars has found a way to measure the impact of losing that biodiversity, which could help inform conservation efforts.
“The loss of biodiversity is threatening ecosystem productivity and services worldwide, spurring efforts to quantify its effects on the functioning of natural ecosystems,” said Jingjing Liang, assistant professor of forest ecology in West Virginia University’s Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design.
Ecosystem services include any positive benefit that plants and animals provide to people including food, fresh water, raw materials and medicinal resources.
A team of scientists, led by Liang, used data from Alaska’s boreal forests to develop a model that measures and quantifies the effects of plant productivity resulting from a loss of species diversity. Other researchers were from the University of Washington, University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Minnesota, University of Western Sydney and the U.S. Geological Survey.
The results of their research were published today (April 20) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Previous research has focused on the positive role of biodiversity on resource acquisition by species in a system. This subsequent research incorporates both resource acquisition and resource utilization efficiency to show that biodiversity loss reduces plant productivity.
“What also differentiates our study from previous research is that we developed a theoretical model to quantify the influence of biodiversity on plant productivity at individual plant and community levels,” said A. David McGuire, an ecosystem modeler with the U.S. Geological Survey and Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “This model enables the scientific community to better integrate biological conservation in natural resource management.”
“The development of our ecological model was inspired and aided by an existing economic theory,” Liang said.
According to co-author and WVU economist Mo Zhou, the theory of diminishing marginal productivity in the context of ecology, indicates that marginal resource productivity will at some point decrease as resource acquisition increases.
Embedding economics in environmental research also reflects a growing interest in biodiversity’s potential impact on ecosystem services to alleviate poverty.
The authors note that as the world struggles to reduce the loss of biodiversity, concern is mounting over the ongoing relationship between biological conservation and poverty, especially in rural areas where livelihoods depend heavily on ecosystem resources.
“Here we demonstrate that there is a positive externality of biodiversity conservation; that is, conserving the diversity of plant species may help to maintain ecosystem services for current and future generations,” Liang said.
Liang, McGuire, and Zhou were joined in the research by Patrick Tobin, from the University of Washington and formerly with the USDA Forest Service’s Northern Research Station in Morgantown, and Peter Reich of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Forest Resources and the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment in Sydney.
-WVU-
dw/04/20/15
Check http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/ daily for the latest news from the University.
Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.