Over 600 biodiversity-ecosystem function experiments have established that many ecosystem services, such as biomass production, carbon storage, and pollination, increase with increasing species richness. Leading conservation organizations are now embracing ecosystem services as an argument for conserving biodiversity.
However, how well the results of small-scale ecological experiments can be extrapolated to real-world landscapes is not known. This seminar presents two of the first landscape- and regional-scale studies of this question, both of which suggest that biodiversity may not be as critical to ecosystem service provision as has been assumed.