Patricia Balvanera

TL;DR: The first rigorous quantitative assessment of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem process rates through meta-analysis of experimental work spanning 50 years to June 2004 shows that biodiversity effects are weaker if biodiversity manipulations are less well controlled.

TL;DR: Scenarios consistently indicate that biodiversity will continue to decline over the 21st century, however, the range of projected changes is much broader than most studies suggest, partly because there are major opportunities to intervene through better policies, but also because of large uncertainties in projections.

TL;DR: Several new questions must now be addressed if this field is going to evolve into a predictive science that can help conserve and manage ecological processes in ecosystems, including questions about how primary producer diversity influences the efficiency of resource use and biomass production in ecosystems.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the rationale for the inclusive valuation of nature's contributions to people (NCP) in decision making, as well as broad methodological steps for doing so, and argue that transformative practices aiming at sustainable futures would benefit from embracing such diversity, which require recognizing and addressing power relationships across stakeholder groups that hold different values on human nature-relations and NCP.

TL;DR: It is proposed that focusing only on instrumental or intrinsic values may fail to resonate with views on personal and collective well-being, or “what is right,” with regard to nature and the environment, and it is time to engage seriously with a third class of values, one with diverse roots and current expressions: relational values.