ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
Biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships in fish communities: biomass is related to evenness and the environment, not to species richness.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Species abundances surpass richness effects in the biodiversity-ecosystem function relationship across marine fishes.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Relative Effects of Eutrophication and Warming on Freshwater Ecosystems Across Ecological Levels.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Shift in relative importance of complementarity and selection drives different effects of community evenness on richness-invasibility relationships.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Emergent Relationships Between the Functional Diversity of Marine Planktonic Copepods and Ecosystem Functioning in the Global Ocean.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Biogeographic and seasonal differences in consumer pressure underlie strong predation in the tropics.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Multi-decadal improvements in the ecological quality of European rivers are not consistently reflected in biodiversity metrics.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Decomposing diversity into measures of evenness, similarity, and richness.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- FISHGLOB_data: an integrated dataset of fish biodiversity sampled with scientific bottom-trawl surveys.Scientific data · 2024Article
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- Ocean acidification drives global reshuffling of ecological communities.Global change biology · 2022Article
- Greater bee diversity is needed to maintain crop pollination over time.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Agrobiodiversity Index scores show agrobiodiversity is underutilized in national food systems.Nature food · 2021Article
- Dominance determines fish community biomass in a temperate seagrass ecosystem.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Article
- Biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships in fish communities: biomass is related to evenness and the environment, not to species richness.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
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Abstract
The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) is a topic of considerable interest to scientists and managers because a better understanding of its underlying mechanisms may help us mitigate the consequences of biodiversity loss on ecosystems. Our current knowledge of BEF relies heavily on theoretical and experimental studies, typically conducted on a narrow range of spatio-temporal scales, environmental conditions, and trophic levels. Hence, whether a relationship holds in the natural environment is poorly understood, especially in exploited marine ecosystems. Using large-scale observations of marine fish communities, we applied a structural equation modelling framework to investigate the existence and significance of BEF relationships across northwestern European seas. We find that ecosystem functioning, here represented by spatial patterns in total fish biomass, is unrelated to species richness-the most commonly used diversity metric in BEF studies. Instead, community evenness, differences in species composition, and abiotic variables are significant drivers. In particular, we find that high fish biomass is associated with fish assemblages dominated by a few generalist species of a high trophic level, who are able to exploit both the benthic and pelagic energy pathway. Our study provides a better understanding of the mechanisms behind marine ecosystem functioning and allows for the integration of biodiversity into management considerations.
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