Food webs are a way of describing the lines of dependency among species in Nature. Such interdependencies are basic to all ecological processes in that species consume resources and are themselves consumed by their predators.
Valuing, managing and conserving marine biodiversity and a full range of ecosystem services is at the forefront of research and policy agendas. However, biodiversity is being lost at up to a thousand times the average background rate. Traditional disciplinary and siloed conservation approaches are not able to tackle this massive loss of biodiversity because they generally ignore or overlook the interactive and dynamic nature of ecosystems processes, limiting their predictability. To conserve marine biodiversity, we must assess the interactions and impacts among biodiversity and ecosystem services (BD-ES). The scaling up in complexity from single species to entire communities is necessary, albeit challenging, for a deeper understanding of how ecosystem services relate to biodiversity and the roles species have in ecosystem service provision. These interactions are challenging to map, let alone fully assess, but network and system-based approaches provide a powerful way to progress beyond those limitations. Here, we introduce a conceptual multi-layered network approach to understanding how ecosystem services supported by biodiversity drive the total service provision, how different stressors impact BD-ES and where conservation efforts should be placed to optimize the delivery of ecosystem services and protection of biodiversity.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Integrative research perspectives on marine conservation’.
26Knowledge about variations in runoff from Greenland to adjacent fjords and seas is important for 27 the hydrochemistry and ocean research communities to understand the link between terrestrial 28 and marine Arctic environments. Here, we simulate the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) surface mass 29 balance (SMB), including refreezing and retention, and runoff together with catchment-scale 30 runoff from the entire Greenland landmass (n = 3,272 simulated catchments) throughout the 35-31 year period 1979-2014. SnowModel/HydroFlow was applied at 3-h intervals to resolve the 32 diurnal cycle and at 5-km horizontal grid increments using ERA-Interim (ERA-I) reanalysis 33 atmospheric forcing. Simulated SMB was low compared to earlier studies, whereas the GrIS 34
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