Understanding the impact of anthropogenic stressors on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning

Marc Cadotte

Human-caused change is altering biodiversity and ecosystem processes across spatial scales.  Biodiversity is the foundation for the functioning of healthy ecosystems and for providing economic and other benefits to human wellbeing. Twenty years of experiments confirm such biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) relationships, but putting this research into real-world environmental change and management scenarios has been surprisingly limited. Environmental change drivers (hereafter referred to as stressors) can impact species differently, with positive, neutral, and negative impacts on their fitness, carrying capacity, interactions, and access to resources -and so predicting the impacts of multiple stressors on changes to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning can be complex. In this talk, I explore two aspects, first how cities are reshaping plant biodiversity globally and highlight collaborative work on a global urban invasions data set. For the second, I will discuss how stressors alter species contributions to function and the nature of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. I use theoretical models to examine how multiple stressors could impact BEF relationships, and then test this with experiments.