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Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function
For example...

What is the relationship between primary productivity and species richness within North American grasslands?

Each of these relationships have been proposed based on experimental or theoretical considerations.

(If you would like an Endnote file which contains more ecological literature relevant to the relationship between biodiversity and productivity, click here. If you would like a text version, click here).
 
A previous workshop conducted at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis attempted to synthesize data from the Long-Term Ecological Research Network to shed light on this question and help determine the empirical relationship (for more details, see Gross, K.L., et al. 2000. Oikos 89:417-427).
 

Within grassland LTER sites there was either no significant relationship, or a negative linear relationship between primary productivity and species density.
 

However, when the spatial extent of analysis was expanded to include all of the grassland LTER sites, the relationship was unimodal.
 
Four key issues arose as a consequence of this workshop:
1) Difficulties in data discovery and retrieval potentially limits the scope of synthetic research (e.g., this research was limited to grassland LTER communities).
2) Data collection for synthetic analyses is extremely labor intensive.
3) Relationship between biodiversity and productivity is scale-dependent.
4) Better access to more data improves the results of synthetic research through enhanced statistical power.
 

For more information about this workshop, be sure to investigate the following references:

Dodson, S. I., S. E. Arnott, and K. L. Cottingham. 2000. The relationship in lake communities between primary productivity and species richness. Ecology 81:2662-2679.

Gough, L., C. W. Osenberg, K. L. Gross, and S. L. Collins. 2000. Fertilization effects on species density and primary productivity in herbaceous plant communities. Oikos 89:428-439.

Gross, K. L., M. R. Willig, L. Gough. R. Inouye, and S. B. Cox. 2000. Species diversity and productivity at different spatial scales in herbaceous plant communities. Oikos 89:417-427.

Mittelbach, G., C. Steiner, S. M. Scheiner, K. L. Gross, H. L. Reynolds, R. B. Waide, M. R. Willig, S. I. Dodson, and L. Gough. In press. The relationship between species richness and productivity depends on scale. Ecology

Scheiner, S. M., S. B. Cox, M. R. Willig, G. G. Mittelbach, C. Osenberg, and M. Kaspari. 2000. Species richness: species area curves and Simpson's paradox. Evolutionary Ecology Research 2:791-802.

Waide, R. B.; M. R. Willig,C. F. Steiner, G. Mittelbach, L. Gough, S. I. Dodson, G. P. Juday, and R. Parmenter. 1999. The relationship between productivity and species richness. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 30: 257-300.


Also - be sure to visit the website devoted to this workshop.
 

Web Contact: jones@nceas.ucsb.edu