J. Emmett Duffy

TL;DR: It is argued that human actions are dismantling the Earth’s ecosystems, eliminating genes, species and biological traits at an alarming rate, and the question of how such loss of biological diversity will alter the functioning of ecosystems and their ability to provide society with the goods and services needed to prosper is asked.

TL;DR: The authors 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, concluding that marine biodiversity loss is increasingly impairing the ocean's capacity to provide food, maintain water quality, and recover from perturbations.

TL;DR: In marine ecosystems, rising atmospheric CO2 and climate change are associated with concurrent shifts in temperature, circulation, stratification, nutrient input, oxygen content, and ocean acidification, with potentially wide-ranging biological effects.

TL;DR: The analyses clearly show that the ecosystem consequences of local species loss are as quantitatively significant as the direct effects of several global change stressors that have mobilized major international concern and remediation efforts.

TL;DR: A formal meta-analysis of studies that have experimentally manipulated species diversity to examine how it affects the functioning of numerous trophic groups in multiple types of ecosystem suggests that the average effect of decreasing species richness is to decrease the abundance or biomass of the focal Trophic group, leading to less complete depletion of resources used by that group.