Publication Date:
2006-11-04
Description:
Human-dominated marine ecosystems are experiencing accelerating loss of populations and species, with largely unknown consequences. 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. Yet available data suggest that at this point, these trends are still reversible.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Worm, Boris -- Barbier, Edward B -- Beaumont, Nicola -- Duffy, J Emmett -- Folke, Carl -- Halpern, Benjamin S -- Jackson, Jeremy B C -- Lotze, Heike K -- Micheli, Fiorenza -- Palumbi, Stephen R -- Sala, Enric -- Selkoe, Kimberley A -- Stachowicz, John J -- Watson, Reg -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2006 Nov 3;314(5800):787-90.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada B3H 4J1. bworm@dal.ca〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17082450" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
*Biodiversity
;
Conservation of Natural Resources
;
Databases, Factual
;
*Ecosystem
;
Eukaryota
;
*Fisheries
;
*Fishes
;
Forecasting
;
Invertebrates
;
Oceans and Seas
;
Plants
;
Population Dynamics
;
Seafood
;
Seawater
;
Water Pollution
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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