As human pressures on ecosystems continue to increase, research involving the effective incorporation of social values information into the context of comprehensive ecosystem services assessments is becoming more important. Including quantified, spatially explicit social value metrics in such assessments will improve the analysis of relative tradeoffs among ecosystem services. This paper descri...

This study was conducted to evaluate the effect of copper extraction on the structure and function of rangelands ecosystem around the mine area in Dareh Zereshk, Yazd province, Iran. Three study sites were considered at the specified intervals of the mine (0-200, 200-500 and 500-1000m). This research was conducted from 2012 to 2013. In each location, three linear transects with a length of 50 m...

My long-term goal is to contribute to our understanding of the way different marine ecosystems function, and to the role of natural selection and micro-evolutionary processes in ecosystem resistance and resilience. In particular, I am interested in the interaction between physical, chemical, and bio-optical properties of the water column and the distribution, productivity, and genetic diversity...

Large terrestrial carnivores are important ecological components and prominent flagship species, but are often extinction prone owing to a combination of biological traits and high levels of human persecution. This study combines phylogenetic and functional diversity evaluations of global and continental large carnivore assemblages to provide a framework for conservation prioritization both bet...

Ecosystems exhibit surprising regularities in structure and function across terrestrial and aquatic biomes worldwide. We assembled a global data set for 2260 communities of large mammals, invertebrates, plants, and plankton. We find that predator and prey biomass follow a general scaling law with exponents consistently near ¾. This pervasive pattern implies that the structure of the biomass pyr...

The importance of species richness in maintaining ecosystem function in the field remains unclear. Recent studies however have suggested that in some systems functionality is maintained by a few abundant species. Here we determine this relationship by quantifying the species responsible for a key ecosystem role, carcass removal by scavengers. We find that, unlike those within largely unaltered ...

As a component of the Mediterranean Forecast System Pilot Project, a data buoy was deployed in the Cretan Sea. A 1-D ecosystem model of the site has been used to investigate the role of surface heat fluxes in determining modelled ecosystem behaviour. The method of calculation of these fluxes, the quality of the data used, and the temporal resolution of the data all had an impact upon the modell...

People depend on benefits provided by ecological systems. Understanding how these ecosystem services - and the ecosystem properties underpinning them - respond to drivers of change is therefore an urgent priority. We address this challenge through developing a novel risk-assessment framework that integrates ecological and evolutionary perspectives on functional traits to determine species' effe...

Factors influencing patterns in the distribution and abundance of plant and animal taxa modulate ecosystem function and ecosystem response to environmental change, which is often taken to infer low functional redundancy among such species, but such relationships are poorly known for microbial communities. Using high-resolution molecular fingerprinting, we demonstrate the existence of extraordin...

Lakes, rivers and estuaries that experience frequent and/or prolonged blooms of cyanobacteria display an array of ecosystem properties that may have impacts on water quality, biological communities and ecosystem services. Some impacts of blooms may be direct, including possible effects of toxins on fish, invertebrates, and other aquatic fauna, or indirect, including: a reduction of submerged pl...