Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 42: A key result from the BIODEPTH experiment. Each line is a statistically significant
fit through the raw data points for a given country (Hector 1999).
Laboratory experiments also tend to support the idea that biodiversity improves the
health of ecosystems. Scientists at Imperial College, London, have developed the 'Eco-
tron', a series of chambers with controlled light, temperature and humidity levels which
house artificially assembled ecological communities, each with differing amounts of
biodiversity. The main result of this research is that more diverse communities fixed
more carbon dioxide from the air. This may seem to be a fairly mundane finding, but
it caused a stir in scientific circles as it showed that biodiversity could have a key role
to play in absorbing some of the vast amounts of the Earth-warming carbon dioxide gas
that our economy is emitting into the atmosphere. In other words, terrestrial biodiversity
may be of major use to us in helping to combat global warming, at least in the short term.
New work in the Ecotron mimicked the elevated carbon dioxide and temperature that are
expected with climate change. The surprising result was that climate change had little
impact on the fauna and flora living above ground, but the community of soil organisms
was greatly altered. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stimulated photosynthesis
amongst the plants, which then transported some of this carbon to their roots as sugars.
The extra soil carbon changed the community of soil fungi, which in turn changed the
community of fungus-eating springtails. These changes in below ground ecology could,
if writ large, have a massive impact on nutrient feedbacks and carbon storage in soils,
but as yet no one knows whether this means that soils will be able to hold more or less
carbon. The fact that there was a change is worrying, and could have an effect on future
strategies for dealing with climate change.
