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Content with tag ecosystem functioning .

An international study defends the important benefits that whales and other stranded cetaceans may provide to society

An international team reviews reviews the multiple ecosystem services that stranded cetacean carcasses have provided to humanity in past and modern times
Regulations involved in the management of stranded whales, dolphins and other cetaceans jeopardize their essential ecological function in coastal areas

Intact but empty forests? Patterns of hunting induced mammal defaunation in the tropics

Tropical forests are increasingly degraded by industrial logging, urbanization, agriculture, and infrastructure, with only 20% of the remaining area considered intact. However, this figure does not include other, more cryptic but pervasive forms of degradation, such as overhunting. Here, the spatial patterns of mammal defaunation in the tropics are quantified and mapped.

Honeybees disrupt the structure and functionality of plant-pollinator networks

The honeybee Apis mellifera is the primary managed species worldwide for both crop pollination and honey production. Owing to beekeeping activity, its high relative abundance potentially affects the structure and functioning of pollination networks in natural ecosystems. Given that evidences about beekeeping impacts are restricted to observational studies of specific species and theoretical simulations, experimental data are still lacking to test for their larger-scale impacts on...

The importance of bee diversity for crop pollination

Ecologists have shown through hundreds of experiments that ecological communities with more species produce higher levels of essential ecosystem functions such as biomass production, nutrient cycling, and pollination, but whether this finding holds in nature is controversial. This knowledge gap is troubling because ecosystem services have been widely adopted as a justification for global biodiversity conservation. .

How will changes in ecosystem functioning affect the demography of animal populations

Temporal variability in primary productivity can change habitat quality for consumer species by affecting the energy levels available as food resources. However, it remains unclear how habitat-quality fluctuations may determine the dynamics of spatially structured populations, where the effects of habitat size, quality and isolation have been customarily assessed assuming static habitats. The first empirical evaluation on the effects of stochastic fluctuations in primary productivity—a...
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