Functional biodiversity research at the global scale

How are ecosystem functions influenced by the loss of species diversity? How does the presence or absence of particular species affect biogeochemical cycles? The group ‘Organismic Biogeochemistry’ addresses these questions by compiling and analyzing global databases of functional plant traits and ecosystem properties. Three examples are presented to show that species identity effects may influence the carbon cycles at large scales and may thus be relevant in the context of climate change.