NSF study: biodiversity loss drives plant destruction

Wildfire near Los Alamos, New Mexico, June 28, 2011
Courtesy of Washington Post.

From a National Science Foundation press release on an NSF-supported study published in Nature:

"This analysis establishes that reduced biodiversity affects ecosystems at levels comparable to those of global warming and air pollution," said Henry Gholz, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research directly and through the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. 

"Some people have assumed that biodiversity effects are relatively minor compared to other environmental stressors," said biologist David Hooper of Western Washington University, the lead author of the paper. 

"Our results show that future loss of species has the potential to reduce plant production just as much as global warming and pollution." 

Studies over the last two decades demonstrated that more biologically diverse ecosystems are more productive.

As a result, there has been growing concern that the very high rates of modern extinctions--due to habitat loss, overharvesting and other human-caused environmental changes--could reduce nature's ability to provide goods and services such as food, clean water and a stable climate...

"Loss of biological diversity due to species extinctions is going to have major effects on our planet, and we need to prepare ourselves to deal with them," said ecologist Bradley Cardinale of the University of Michigan, one of the paper's co-authors. "These extinctions may well rank as one of the top five drivers of global change."