Relationships between attributes of biodiversity and ecosystem function are of vital theoretical and practical importance. For example, reducing the negative consequences of reductions of biodiversity as a result of human activities requires an understanding of the role that biodiversity plays in maintaining critical life support processes or ecosystem services. Nonetheless, little consensus exists in the scientific community concerning the form of those relationships or the mechanisms that give rise to them. Perhaps the only thing about which most investigators agree is that patterns may be scale-dependent, with multiple mechanisms operating at different spatial and temporal scales.

Like many general and broad-scale questions in ecology, the data needed to address critical aspects of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function are scattered, heterogeneous, and complex. The Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) is a tool that offers a significant advancement in synthesizing relevant environmental information to more thoroughly address this important ecological relationship and to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms that give rise to it.

To demonstrate the ability of the KNB to substantially advance ecological understanding, we explore the scale-dependent relationship between species diversity and ecosystem processes in four stages:

1. Validation

In the validation phase, we will assess the efficacy with which the KNB identifies and retrieves data on productivity and species richness from grassland Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites, which previously were analyzed through efforts of a working group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.

2. Expansion

In the expansion phase, we will enlarge the domain of analyses to include other field sites in the LTER network, Organization of Biological Field Stations, and the California Nature Reserve System.

3. Amplification

In the amplification phase, we will expand analyses to include measures of biodiversity other than species richness, as well as measures of ecosystem function other than productivity.

4. Extrapolation

In the extrapolation phase, the KNB will access a broad array of information from selected governmental and public databases, as well as from climatic and earth science computer models, to explore relationships at continental or global scales.

Web Contact: jones@nceas.ucsb.edu