Carbon storage by ecosystems is valuable for climate protection. Biodiversity conservation may help increase carbon storage, but the value of this influence has been difficult to assess. We use plant, soil, and ecosystem carbon storage data from two grassland biodiversity experiments to show that greater species richness increases economic value: Increasing species richness from 1 to 10 had twi...

Agricultural development is a leading cause of habitat destruction that increasingly threatens global biodiversity. To help understand the likelihood and implications of agricultural expansion in areas of high conservation importance, this article examines agricultural suitability in forested portions of biodiversity hotspots and tropical wilderness areas, regions with especially rich concentra...

In this study, we investigated the relationship between agricultural biodiversity and dietary diversity of children and whether factors such as economic access may affect this relationship. This paper is based on data collected in a baseline cross-sectional survey in November 2013.The study population comprising 1200 mother-child pairs was selected using a two-stage cluster sampling. Dietary di...

Preservation of biodiversity, and particularly agricultural biodiversity, has been recognized as being critical to sustaining productive ecosystems, and has been suggested as a viable strategy to promote adequate human nutrition and food security (1). In sub-Saharan Africa, farm sizes are generally small, have been declining and are expected to continue to decline over the next decades. At the ...

Agricultural expansion remains one of the leading causes of deforestation, biodiversity losses and environmental degradation across the world, especially in the tropics (Angelsen et al., 1999 and Norris, 2008). From 1961 to 1993, the world population increased by 80% (Goklany, 1998). Due to the rapidly expanding human populations large increases in the supply of agricultural products are requir...

Protected areas are increasingly considered to play a key role in the global maintenance of ecosystem processes and the ecosystem services they provide. It is thus vital to assess the extent to which existing protected area systems represent those services. Here, for the first time, we document the effectiveness of the current Chilean protected area system and its planned extensions in represen...