Impacts Of Marine Biodiversity Loss On Ocean Ecosystem Services
Marine biodiversity loss is increasingly impairing the ocean’s capacity to provide food for humans and other animals, maintain water quality, and recover from disturbances like erosion. However, the available data suggest that these trends are still reversible.
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.
[Excerpted from report abstract]