Photo Credit: Francesco Ungaro
Scientific Frontline: Extended "At a Glance" Summary: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functional Redundancy
The Core Concept: Functional redundancy is the ecological theory that ecosystems possess a "spare capacity" of species that can substitute for one another, meaning the loss of a few species causes little harm to overall ecosystem function. A massive 2026 global study reveals that this capacity has been vastly overestimated, demonstrating that ecosystem benefits continually increase with greater biodiversity rather than leveling off.
Key Distinction/Mechanism: Unlike the previous assumption that ecosystems have built-in backups, the data shows an additive mechanism where most ecological benefits, such as water purification and pollination, climb steadily as diversity rises. An exception is hazard protection, such as coastal flooding prevention, which relies heavily on specific foundational species, rather than overall diversity.
Origin/History: Published on October 6, 2026, in Nature Ecology & Evolution by researchers from King's College London and Imperial College London, this study is the largest of its kind, combining 423 published studies and 222,829 data points across multiple global ecosystems.
Major Frameworks/Components:
- Functional Redundancy: The challenged hypothesis that species can seamlessly substitute for one another to maintain ecosystem functions.
- Ocean Carbon Sequestration: "Blue carbon" sinks, which capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide, show the strongest positive response to marine biodiversity, relying on communities ranging from phytoplankton to complex microbial food webs.
- Foundational Species Dependency: The targeted reliance on one or two critical species, such as shrubs that stabilize sand dunes, for specific services like coastal erosion protection.
- Socioeconomic Projections: The integration of biodiversity data with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models, predicting future declines in services, such as biological pest control, under high fossil-fuel development paths.
Branch of Science: Evolutionary Ecology, Marine Biology, Environmental Science, and Conservation Biology.
Future Application: The resulting database and predictive models will allow policymakers to forecast the benefits of biodiversity in specific locations, improving conservation planning, climate mitigation strategies, and the management of blue carbon sinks.
Why It Matters: As global biodiversity declines, the loss of even a few species significantly threatens essential human life support systems, including food security, natural pest control, and climate protection, proving that marine life and diverse ecosystems are irreplaceable for climate stability.
New research led by King’s College London and Imperial College London warns that a lack of biodiversity could threaten people’s food security and climate protection, as diverse ecosystems provide a wide range of benefits that people depend on, including pollination, water purification, carbon storage, and natural pest control.
The study, by King’s College London and Imperial College London with the Natural History Museum, has found that ecosystems have far less "spare" capacity than previously thought, with the ocean potentially having the most to lose.
The study, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, combined 423 published studies and 222,829 data points across land, freshwater, marine, and estuarine ecosystems, producing a database more than twice the size of the largest previous effort and the largest of its kind.
Across 23 categories of ecosystem services and functions, most benefits rose steadily with biodiversity rather than leveling off once a handful of species were present. The findings suggest that functional redundancy—the idea that species can substitute for one another, so losses do little harm—has been overestimated.
Ocean carbon sequestration, the process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere into marine waters and sediments, showed by far the strongest positive response to biodiversity of any service measured.
This indicates that so-called blue carbon sinks—ocean and coastal ecosystems such as coral reefs, salt marshes, or mangroves that capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—depend on sustaining diverse marine communities, from phytoplankton to the microbial food webs that pump carbon into deep water. The authors caution that this result rests on a small number of datasets and identify it as an urgent gap in current knowledge.
Dr. Moffett goes on to say, "The ocean result stopped us in our tracks. Carbon capture at sea responded to biodiversity more strongly than anything else we measured, and yet it's one of the least studied areas we found. If the world is counting on blue carbon to help with climate change, marine life can't be an afterthought."
Some ecosystem services proved to be exceptions. Protection against hazards such as coastal flooding and erosion was relatively insensitive to biodiversity overall, because it often depends on one or two foundational species, such as the shrubs that stabilize sand dunes. The authors argue that conservation must therefore balance maintaining overall diversity with safeguarding irreplaceable foundational species.
Dr. Will Pearse, an associate professor of evolutionary ecology in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, said, "We’ve known that biodiversity supports humanity by providing us with food, clean water, clean air, and so many other ecosystem services. But what this model gives us is a precise, global picture: we can now predict the benefits biodiversity provides anywhere, making it even easier to recognize and take advantage of those benefits."
The full database and model forecasts across all 23 ecosystem service and function categories are publicly available to support policy and planning.
The team also used the database to look ahead, linking it to biodiversity projections under the socioeconomic scenarios used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The researchers' model predicts that biological pest control on farmland, delivered free by the natural enemies of crop pests, declines under a fossil-fuel-driven development path compared with one with less fossil fuel, with the sharpest losses in countries experiencing rapid population growth and lower levels of development.
Reference material: What Is: Ecosystem
Published in journal: Nature Ecology & Evolution
Title: Biodiversity safeguards ecosystem services and functions worldwide
Authors: Emma R. Moffett, Joel H. Gayford, Lexi Chen, Olivia F. Morris, Yuming Shi, Lucy Somekh, Nicole Stasik, Andy Purvis, Guy Woodward, and William D. Pearse
Source/Credit: King’s College London
Edited by: Scientific Frontline
Reference Number: eco100626_01
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