Ecology - Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: Current knowledge and future challenges

The ecological consequences of biodiversity loss have aroused considerable interest and controversy during the past decade. Major advances have been m ade in describing the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem processes, in identifying functionally important species, and in revealing underlying mechanisms. There is, however, uncertainty as to how results obt ained in recent experiments scale up to landscape and regional levels and g eneralize across ecosystem types and processes. Larger numbers of species a re probably needed to reduce temporal variability in ecosystem processes in changing environments. A major future challenge is to determine how biodiv ersity dynamics, ecosystem processes, and abiotic factors interact.