Africa’s wildlife has lost a third of its ‘ecological power,’ study says

It’s a fundamental question for ecologists in this age: How are biodiversity losses reshaping how ecosystems function? A recent study quantifies the impact of biodiversity and abundance losses on ecological functions by tracking the energy flows within them. “African wildlife has lost a third of its ecological power — the energy that drives vital ecosystem functions such as nutrient cycling, seed dispersal, and carnivory or pest control,” Ty Loft, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford, U.K., and first author of the paper published in the journal Nature, told Mongabay by email.

Conventional approaches that focus only on species abundance can tell us how animal populations have changed, for example, to what extent elephant numbers have fallen in a given region. But translating these changes into ecosystem-wide shifts is difficult, and doing so across thousands of species in a variety of ecosystems is a mammoth challenge.

Ecological energetics quantifies how species shape ecosystems through their food intake, their ecological roles, and the energy that flows through them. Energy is constantly being transferred from vegetation to animals, between animals, and from animals back to the environment. The natural realm isn’t a static space with animals tacked onto it; these are living, breathing worlds with which animals inhabit and interact. Take vegetation: animals directly shape the landscape by grazing and browsing (eating), and indirectly through the dispersal of seeds and nutrients (e.g., through pooping).

A Jackson’s hartebeest in Uganda. Image by Julie Larsen ©WCS. In the paper, Loft and his colleagues...This article was originally published on Mongabay