Diversity, biomass, and productivity, the three key community/ecosystem variables, are interrelated and pose reciprocal influences on each other. The relationships among the three variables have been a central focus in ecology and formed two schools of fundamentally different nature with two related applications: (1) management – how biomass manipulation (e.g., grazing, burning) affects diversi...

Increasingly, forest management and conservation plans require spatially explicit information within a management or conservation unit. Forest biomass and potential productivity are critical variables for forest planning and assessment in the Pacific Northwest. Their values are often estimated from ground-measured sample data. For unsampled locations, forest analysts and planners lack forest pr...

Annual biomass and productivity of Thalassia testudinum were determined during a year at a seagrass bed located in the Parque Nacional Morrocoy, Venezuela. Leaf, rhizome and root biomass were determined monthly, together with short-shoot density, from February 1992 to January 1993, from nine replicated core samples. Productivity was measured using the methodology by Zieman (1974) with minor mod...

Cyanobacteria have a strong potential for biofuel production due to their ability to accumulate large amounts of carbohydrates. Nitrogen (N) stress can be used to increase the content of carbohydrates in the biomass, but it is expected to reduce biomass productivity. To study this trade-off between carbohydrate accumulation and biomass productivity, we characterized the biomass productivity, bi...

[1] Delayed onset of the spring transition and upwellingfavorable winds in the Pacific Northwest during springsummer 2005 resulted in a positive temperature anomaly and a pronounced negative anomaly in surface phytoplankton biomass (chlorophyll a) and primary productivity. Compared to time periods before and after the warm water event, total biomass was reduced by ca. 50% along a hydrographic l...

A thermophilic cyanobacterium named Thermosynechococcus CL–1 (TCL–1) was cultivated in the flat plate photobioreactors under strong illumination with dense culture to examine the effects of nutrient concentrations on the biomass production, CO2 fixation, and the potential as the feedstock for bioethanol production. The results show that concentrations of Na, NO3, and CaCl2•2H2O, should be decre...

The Earth's atmosphere will continue to be enriched with carbon dioxide (CO2) over the coming century. Carbon dioxide enrichment often reduces leaf transpiration, which in water-limited ecosystems may increase soil water content, change species abundances and increase the productivity of plant communities. The effect of increased soil water on community productivity and community change may be ...

The idea that productivity regulates species diversity is deeply ingrained in the field of ecology. Yet, over the past few decades, an increasing number of experiments have shown that species diversity controls, rather than simply responds to, biomass production. These contrasting perspectives have led to a seeming paradox: Is diversity the cause or the consequence of biological production? Her...

In this paper we predict and optimize the biomass surface productivity of microalgae in continuous culture under a constant light source. Surface biomass is identified as a key variable for assessing productivity: we provide both a mathematical and intuitive explanation. For reaching maximal productivities, biomass surface concentration must be such that growth at the culture bottom (assuming a...

Understanding the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem productivity has become a central issue in ecology and conservation biology studies, particularly when these relationships are connected with global climate change and species extinction. However, which facets of biodiversity (i.e. taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity) account most for variations in productivity are...