environmentjournal.online
Nature's safety net is disappearing as species are lost
The ability of ecosystems to withstand species loss without suffering major damage has been greatly overestimated, according to the largest global study of its kind. Researchers from King’s College London, Imperial College London, the Natural History Museum and The Alan Turing Institute found that ecosystems have far less ‘spare’ capacity than previously thought, raising concerns about the potential consequences of biodiversity loss for food security and climate protection. The study, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, combined 423 previous studies and more than 222,000 data points covering land, freshwater, marine and estuarine ecosystems. Researchers looked at 23 different ways ecosystems support nature and people, from pollination and pest control to carbon storage and water purification. They found that most benefits increased steadily as biodiversity increased, rather than reaching a plateau after a relatively small number of species were present. The findings challenge the idea of ‘functional redundancy’ – the assumption that species can readily substitute for one another, meaning the loss of individual species has little immediate impact on how an ecosystem functions. Dr Emma Moffett, the study’s lead author and a lecturer in geography at King’s College London, said: ‘Our findings challenge the comfortable assumption has been that ecosystems...
