We’re excited to see our long-term efforts pay off with publication in Ecology Letters of an Ideas & Perspectives piece: “Ecosystem context illuminates conflicting roles of diversity in ecosystem carbon storage.” Our goal was to help merge the “state factors” approach from ecosystem ecology and the biodiversity & ecosystem functioning perspective. That is, how much new information do we gain if we include diversity as an interactive factor affecting ecosystem properties, in the context of other well-known ecosystem controls, such as climate, topography, time since disturbance, and organism functional traits? We used a long-term, broad-scale data set from Quebec forests to explore this question.
Here’s an artist’s conception of this paper by undergraduate student Rowan Day.
