Giving Compass' Take:

· Harrison Tasoff explores the importance of biodiversity for a thriving environment and how it plays a bigger role in sustaining healthy kelp forests than previously thought.

· What is biodiversity and why is it so important? What can we do to protect and support biodiversity? 

· Read more on this topic and the current state of biodiversity.

An ecosystem arises from the effects of many different levels of organization. There are the species, their populations, the communities they live in, and the network of these communities over the entire region. But scientists are still exploring how the dynamics at different levels combine to determine the properties of the ecosystem as a whole.

“We wanted to understand which factors were most important in stabilizing the regional biomass of the macroalgae that thrive beneath the canopy of giant kelp,” says lead author Thomas Lamy, a postdoctoral scholar at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A stable community might see changes in its composition over time, but the overall mass of the plants and animals will remain relatively constant.

Scientists associate stability with two general characteristics: the diversity of different species and the number of patches in the region. If a region has many species, at least some will do well under a given set of conditions. Having a large number of independent communities can also promote stability. In this case, the health of each patch rises and falls independently, so they tend to average out, increasing the overall stability of the ecosystem.

Read the full article about the role of biodiversity in kelp forests by Harrison Tasoff at Futurity.