Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services.
Human-dominated marine ecosystems are experiencing accelerating loss of populations and species, with largely unknown consequences. We analyzed local experiments, long-term regional time series, and global fisheries data to test how biodiversity loss affects marine ecosystem services across temporal and spatial scales. Overall, rates of resource collapse increased and recovery potential, stability, and water quality decreased exponentially with declining diversity. Restoration of biodiversity, in contrast, increased productivity fourfold and decreased variability by 21%, on average. We conclude that marine biodiversity loss is increasingly impairing the ocean's capacity to provide food, maintain water quality, and recover from perturbations. Yet available data suggest that at this point, these trends are still reversible.
Worm
Boris
B
Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada B3H 4J1. bworm@dal.ca
Barbier
Edward B
EB
Beaumont
Nicola
N
Duffy
J Emmett
JE
Folke
Carl
C
Halpern
Benjamin S
BS
Jackson
Jeremy B C
JB
Lotze
Heike K
HK
Micheli
Fiorenza
F
Palumbi
Stephen R
SR
Sala
Enric
E
Selkoe
Kimberley A
KA
Stachowicz
John J
JJ
Watson
Reg
R
D000818:Animals; D044822:Biodiversity; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D016208:Databases, Factual; D017753:Ecosystem; D056890:Eukaryota; D005398:Fisheries; D005399:Fishes; D005544:Forecasting; D007448:Invertebrates; D009792:Oceans and Seas; D010944:Plants; D011157:Population Dynamics; D017747:Seafood; D012623:Seawater; D014876:Water Pollution