When I first heard that we could get extra credit for our
biology class by attending an ecology lecture by Professor David Hooper I
thought, why wouldn’t I go? This is the first professional in the field of
biology I have ever heard of with my same last name!
Professor Hooper began his lecture by posing the question,
“Do changes in diversity effect ecosystem processes?” He then further broke this question down into three more
questions: 1) What are the magnitudes of effects on processes relative to other
environmental changes? 2) What are the effects on things that people care
about? 3) How are ecosystems actually changing?
To explain the answer to his first question, he went into
details about his recently published paper, “A global synthesis reveals biodiversity
loss as a major driver of ecosystem change”. This paper was a meta analysis of
192 studies containing 574 experiments all following a specific criteria.
Hooper looked at productivity vs. species richness (SR) of primary producers
and decomposition vs. SR of primary producers as well as vs. consumers. Overall
he found that with species loss productivity decreases and these effects on
productivity were comparable to the effects of other environmental
changes. When looking at decomposition
it was found that a decrease in litter diversity did not show significant
change in decomposition while a change in consumer levels did show a change.
All of these results showed high variability.
His second question was explained by looking at different
kinds of ecosystem services, excluding cultural services. In the end, this
question had mixed results because ecosystem services are hard to quantify and
mean different things to different people.
Hooper concluded with answering his third question and saying
that there is a need for further research on a larger scale so that we will
better be able to look at and understand the connection between biodiversity
effects and ecosystem changes in the real world.
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