Response Diversity, Ecosystem Change, and Resilience

Emodiversity and the emotional ecosystem.

“…We draw our operationalization of emodiversity from research in the natural sciences on the benefits of biodiversity (i.e., the variety and relative abundance of different types of organisms within an ecosystem), which has been shown to foster adaptive flexibility and promote ecosystem resilience (Danovaro et al, 2008;Elmqvist et al, 2003;Heller & Zavaleta, 2009;Potvin & Gotelli, 2008;Rammel & van den Bergh, 2003;Tilman, Reich, & Knops, 2006). We adapted the Shannon biodiversity index, which quantifies the number of species and the evenness of species in a biological ecosystem (Magurran, 2004;Shannon, 1948), to quantify emodiversity, or the richness (how many specific emotions are experienced) and evenness (the extent to which specific emotions are experienced in the same proportion) in the human emotional ecosystem.…”

A safe operating space for humanity

“…Species loss therefore affects both the functioning of ecosystems and their potential to respond and adapt to changes in physical and biotic conditions (Elmqvist et al 2003, Suding et al 2008). …”

Pole-to-Pole Connections: Similarities between Arctic and Antarctic Microbiomes and Their Vulnerability to Environmental Change

“…Communities with a higher diversity often show a higher resilience toward perturbations, as functional redundancy lowers the chance for key species to vanish during perturbations (Yachi and Loreau, 1999). Similarly, increased richness might also be beneficial to a community by enabling a community to react with several distinct responses to a perturbation, increasing the resilience (Elmqvist et al, 2003;Folke et al, 2004). Higher temperatures in the polar regions will probably directly influence microbial communities by an elongation of the growth season, the availability of freshwater and daily temperature cycles with less freeze-thaw events.…”