Relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning across different scales

摘要

Relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning have been extensively studied (Loreau et al. 2002), but the spatial and temporal scales of the biodiversity examined vary widely among individual studies. I organized a symposium, "Relationships Between Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning Across Different Scales", at the 51st Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Japan (March 2005) to facilitate a discussion on what direction should be taken toward unifying approaches at different scales. An international collaboration, "Biodiversity and Ecological Complexity", under the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science program between the Centre for Population Biology (CPB) at Imperial College, the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, and the Center for Ecological Research at Kyoto University (1997-2002) formed the background to the symposium. The first leaders of this program were John Lawton, awarded the Japan International Prize in 2004, Simon Levin, who received the Kyoto Prize in 2005, and the late Masahiko Higashi. They contributed to the development of biodiversity research by organizing international workshops and sending young researchers to work under each other.