Biodiversity and Ecosystem Productivity
Biodiversity and ecosystem productivity in streams
One of the oldest and richest questions in ecology is that of how species diversity relates to biological productivity. Historically, researchers have viewed differences in biodiversity among communities or ecoregions as being a consequence of differences in levels of productivity. In recent years, ecologists have begun to view the relationship between diversity and productivity from a fundamentally different angle, examining how biodiversity controls, rather than simply responds to, the production of biomass in ecosystems. We are developing theory and performing experiments to help us address the question of how biodiversity might be both a cause and a consequence of ecosystem productivity in the same ecological system. Comparative field experiments that manipulate rates of resource supply in streams spanning both natural gradients in diversity, and gradients that occur from natural to human dominated landscapes are an important component of our approach.