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Does biodiversity affect ecosystem services?

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Ecosystem services have an uneasy conceptual relationship with biodiversity. While small-scale changes in species richness do affect ecosystem services related to resource use, the generality of the relationship is unclear for the full range of services, for different aspects of biodiversity, or at large scales. Furthermore, many drivers that affect biodiversity also have direct effects on services (e.g., road building that destroys species’ habitats also disrupts hydrology and pollutes waterways). The key question is whether biodiversity losses – e.g. species’ declines and landscape homogenisation – are directly diminishing ecosystem services, or the major process is that both are responding to common drivers.

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The role of natural capital

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While the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) suggested that biodiversity underpins ecosystem services, this downplays the broader role of environmental condition and function, which can be considered together as ‘Natural Capital’. For example, forest conversion to cropland releases carbon not only through biodiversity loss, but primarily by biomass destruction and soil disruption. Any consideration of services flowing from biodiversity stocks must set this in the context of the complete stock of natural capital and its effect on services.

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Functional relationships

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The UK National Ecosystem Assessment (UKNEA) outlined a framework by which ‘intermediate services’ or ecosystem functions produce ‘final ecosystem services’ which in turn produce ‘goods’ of value to society. Fig. 1 shows our development of the UKNEA framework to include biodiversity and its functional relationship with final services.

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Stakeholders

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We have engaged a broad range of stakeholders from the project pre-proposal stage. These partners also sit on the Wessex BESS Advisory Panel and will be closely involved in guiding various aspects of the research.

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