title: The quest for a mechanistic understanding of biodiversity-ecosystem services relationships.
abstract: Ecosystem services (ES) approaches to biodiversity conservation are currently high on the ecological research and policy agendas. However, despite a wealth of studies into biodiversity's role in maintaining ES (B-ES relationships) across landscapes, we still lack generalities in the nature and strengths of these linkages. Reasons for this are manifold, but can largely be attributed to (i) a lack of adherence to definitions and thus a confusion between final ES and the ecosystem functions (EFs) underpinning them, (ii) a focus on uninformative biodiversity indices and singular hypotheses and (iii) top-down analyses across large spatial scales and overlooking of context-dependency. The biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (B-EF) field provides an alternate context for examining biodiversity's mechanistic role in shaping ES, focusing on species' characteristics that may drive EFs via multiple mechanisms across contexts. Despite acknowledgements of a need for B-ES research to look towards underlying B-EF linkages, the connections between these areas of research remains weak. With this review, we pull together recent B-EF findings to identify key areas for future developments in B-ES research. We highlight a means by which B-ES research may begin to identify how and when multiple underlying B-EF relationships may scale to final ES delivery and trade-offs.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, Regent's Park, London NW1 4RY, UK Department of Geography, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK clare.duncan@ioz.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Clare
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Duncan
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: Julian R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Thompson
authors.affiliation: Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, Regent's Park, London NW1 4RY, UK.
authors.forename: Nathalie
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Pettorelli
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D004463:Ecology / Q000379:methods; D017753:Ecosystem
keywords: biodiversity; biodiversity–ecosystem services relationships; ecosystem function; ecosystem services; mechanisms; proxies