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Via : Science Mag:
Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services: Boris Worm & al.
(...).We analyzed local experiments, long-term regional time series, and global fisheries data to test how biodiversity loss affects marine ecosystem services across temporal and spatial scales. Overall, rates of resource collapse increased and recovery potential, stability, and water quality decreased exponentially with declining diversity. Restoration of biodiversity, in contrast, increased productivity fourfold and decreased variability by 21%, on average. We conclude that marine biodiversity loss is increasingly impairing the ocean's capacity to provide food, maintain water quality, and recover from perturbations. (...)

Conclusions. Positive relationships between diversity and ecosystem functions and services were found using experimental and correlative approaches along trajectories of diversity loss and recovery. Our data highlight the societal consequences of an ongoing erosion of diversity that appears to be accelerating on a global scale. This trend is of serious concern because it projects the global collapse of all taxa currently fished by the mid–21st century (based on the extrapolation of regression to 100% in the year 2048)(...).

Technorati Keywords: ecology biodiversity