Quantifying Relationships between Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function with Experiments

In the early 1990s, it became increasingly recognized that despite mounting global biodiversity losses, science was limited in its ability to predict the effects of the changes. In the process of community assembly-the formation of a local community by a subset of a regional species pool-many potential community members are excluded or filtered by biotic or abiotic factors. Mixed-effects regression models were also ideal for quantifying the variation in the intercepts and slopes of the regressions of function on diversity among the locations within multisite studies. Positive diversity-stability relationships can be related to the presence of species-specific responses to changing environmental conditions and functional redundancy within groups of species. The first-generation experiments were often designed to understand fundamental mechanisms and were therefore stripped of much ecological complexity. Biodiversity effects on individual ecosystem processes including productivity and nutrient-use efficiency have been extensively studied.