The Role of Species in Ecosystems: Aspects of Ecological Complexity and Biological Diversity

The international cooperative research program known as the “SymBiosphere” project (Kawanabe et al. 1993) has as its organizing principles that ecological complexity plays a key role in promoting biodiversity, and that it is fundamentally important, for the conservation and recovery of biodiversity, to understand how this diversity is created and sustained. In this chapter, I want to explore three aspects of the role of species in ecosystems that illuminate different facets of “ecological complexity,” how it promotes biodiversity, and what the consequences of loss of biodiversity may be for the maintenance of that complexity. The essay was originally published in Oikos (Lawton 1994), and appears here in a modified form, with the kind permission of that journal.

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