HR: 11:45h
AN: NB22A-06    [Abstracts]
TI: Does functional redundancy exist?
AU: * Cardinale, B J
EM: bjcardinale@wisc.edu
AF: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Zoology, Madison, WI 53706 United States
AB: Human activities are triggering rates of species extinction not seen since prior mass extinctions, and loss of biological diversity now ranks among the most prominent changes to the global environment. It has been argued that reductions in diversity could alter how efficiently biologically limiting resources are captured by communities and converted into new biomass. Although this prediction is derived from one of the most fundamental tenets of species coexistence (niche theory), empirical evidence has been mixed. In fact, many studies suggest that a large fraction of co-occurring species are functionally redundant, and their absence from experimentally assembled communities does not lead to any notable change in the fluxes of energy or matter that underlie ecosystem processes. Can these contrasting theoretical and empirical perspectives be resolved? Here I discuss the mismatch in scale that has led to differing conclusions of theory and empiricism, as well as the opposing forces of coexistence that do verses do not allow species to be functionally redundant. I conclude with a call for research among aquatic ecologists who study systems that may very well hold the key insights needed to overcome the major hurdles currently faced in this area of research.
DE: 1615 Biogeochemical processes (4805)
SC: North American Benthological Society [NB]
MN: 2005 Joint Assembly