Justin P. Wright

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.

TL;DR: It is shown that although productive species do indeed contribute to diversity effects, these contributions are equaled or exceeded by species complementarity, where biomass is augmented by biological processes that involve multiple species.

TL;DR: Testing the hypothesis that herbaceous plant species losses caused by eutrophication may be offset by increased light availability due to herbivory demonstrates that nutrients and herbivores can serve as counteracting forces to control local plant diversity through light limitation, independent of site productivity, soil nitrogen, herbivore type and climate.

TL;DR: It is suggested that distinguishing between functional response traits and functional effect traits both in combinatorial manipulations of biodiversity and in descriptive studies of BEF could markedly improve the power of such studies.

TL;DR: It is suggested that ecosystem engineers will increase species richness at the landscape scale whenever there are species present in a landscape that are restricted to engineered habitats during at least some stages of their life cycle.