The research, led by King's College London and Imperial College London with the Natural History Museum and The Alan Turing Institute, synthesized data from 423 published studies comprising 222,829 data points across terrestrial, freshwater, marine, and estuarine ecosystems. This created a database more than twice the size of the previous largest effort in the field. The authors examined 23 distinct categories of ecosystem services and functions, ranging from pollination and water purification to carbon storage and natural pest control.
Across most of these services, benefits rose steadily with increasing biodiversity rather than plateauing once only a few species were present, challenging the idea of functional redundancy—that lost species can be easily replaced by others without significant consequence. Lead author Dr. Emma Moffett explained that the data do not support the comfortable assumption that ecosystems carry ample backup, meaning ecological benefits decline as diversity falls. In contrast, ocean carbon sequestration showed the strongest positive response to biodiversity of any service measured, though the authors note this result rests on a limited number of datasets and represents an urgent knowledge gap.
The image represents a natural habitat where diverse species contribute to functions like pollination and carbon storage, as discussed in the article.
Some services, such as protection against coastal flooding and erosion, proved relatively insensitive to overall biodiversity because they often depend on just one or two foundational species (e.g., shrubs that stabilize sand dunes). The researchers argue that effective conservation must therefore balance maintaining broad biodiversity with safeguarding these critical foundational elements. Their publicly available model forecasts, linked to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change socioeconomic scenarios, also predict that biological pest control on farmland will decline more sharply under fossil‑fuel‑driven development pathways, especially in regions with rapid population growth and lower development levels.