Aquatic Functional Biodiversity: An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective provides a general conceptual framework by some of the most prominent investigators in the field for how to link eco-evolutionary approaches with functional diversity to understand and conserve the provisioning of ecosystem services in aquatic systems. Rather than producing another methodological book, the editors and authors primarily concentrate on defining common grounds, connecting conceptual frameworks and providing examples by a more detailed discussion of a few empirical studies and projects, which illustrate key ideas and an outline of potential future directions and challenges that are expected in this interdisciplinary research field.
Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in using network approaches to disentangle the relationship between biodiversity, community structure and functioning. Novel methods for model construction are being developed constantly, and modern methods allow for the inclusion of almost any type of explanatory variable that can be correlated either with biodiversity or ecosystem functioning. As a result these models have been widely used in ecology, conservation and eco-evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, there remains a considerable gap on how well these approaches are feasible to understand the mechanisms on how biodiversity constrains the provisioning of ecosystem services.
Andre Belgrano is currently at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Aquatic Resources, Institute of Marine Research, Lysekil, and at the Swedish Institute for the Marine Environment (SIME), Gothenburg, in Sweden. He has held faculty positions in the United States at the University of Maryland, University of New Mexico, University of Washington, and was a visiting scientist at the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR), Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Dr Belgrano is broadly interested in ecological and evolutionary studies that use ecosystem status and trend data, for characterising relationships between diversity patterns and ecosystem functioning, which includes the effect of commercial fisheries, climate change and environmental variability.
His research approach is to use the broad concepts of macroecology, food webs theory and evolution to understand the underlying common rules governing ecosystem dynamics and functioning. Most of Dr Belgrano’s current work focuses on functional biodiversity, ecosystem-based management for marine fisheries, ocean health, governance, sustainability and resilience in aquatic systems.
Guy Woodward is Professor of Ecology in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London and Series Editor for Advances in Ecological Research. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including recent papers in Nature, Science and Nature Climate Change, with a strong emphasis on understanding and predicting how aquatic ecosystems and food webs respond to a wide range of biotic and abiotic stressors, including climate change, chemical pollution, habitat degradation and invasive species. Much of this work covers multiple scales in space and time and also a range of organisational levels - from genes to ecosystems. His research group and ongoing collaborations span the natural and social sciences, reflecting the need for multidisciplinary approaches for addressing the environmental challenges of the 21st Century.
Ute Jacob is a Research Scientist at the Institute of Hydrobiology and Fisheries Science, University of Hamburg, Germany. She has contributed to previously published books as well as high-impact peer-reviewed journal articles. Dr. Jacob has been co-editor of two volumes of Advances in Ecological Research as well as a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and is very active in this area of research.
