Selection 20

Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services

Boris Worm et al.

Research has shown that marine biodiversity loss is constantly impairing the ocean's capacity to provide food, maintain water quality, and recover from perturbations. Changes in marine biodiversity are concerning to what exact human impacts they would result in and are directly caused by exploitation, pollution, and habitat destruction, or indirectly through climate change. Globally, marine extinctions are slightly becoming more evident. Where as locally, areas are witnessing a rapid loss in populations. From experiments we have found that increased biodiversity of primary producers and consumers enhanced all examined ecosystem processes. These results along with tests taken from coastal ecosystems indicated that there is a positive correlation between biodiversity, productivity, and stability across trophic levels in marine ecosystems. These regional biodiversity losses impaired the number of viable fisheries, provision of nursery habitats, and loss of filtering and detoxification services. This data illustrates that substantial loss of biodiversity is closely associated with the regional loss of ecosystem services and increasing risks for coastal organisms. The collapse of large marine ecosystems also occur at a higher rate in species-poor ecosystems and proportional species losses are predicted to have similar effects at low and high levels of native biodiversity. Marine reserves and fishery closures have been used to reverse the decline of marine biodiversity on local and regional scales. Fisheries are able to recover easily because they can switch more readily among target species and can help us determine if and how can we reverse the loss of our services. There is a large variation in sample sizes and several variables that effect the outcomes, but the results do suggest that it is possible to recover lost biodiversity on local to regional scales. This trend of biodiversity loss is a because it projects the global collapse of all marine life currently fished. But by restoring marine biodiversity we can invest in the productivity and reliability of the goods and services that the ocean provides and recover from our biodiversity loss.