Biodiversity: Findings of experimental sites are reliable

Aerial view of the Jena Experiment. Jena Experiment Much of our knowledge of how biodiversity benefits ecosystems comes from experimental sites. These sites contain combinations of species that are not found in the real world, which has led some ecologists to question the findings from biodiversity experiments. But the positive effects of biodiversity for the functioning of ecosystems are more than an artefact of experimental design. This is the result of a new study led by an international team of researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Leipzig University (UL), the University of Bern and the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre. Scientists from the Institute of Landscape Ecology at the University of Münster have contributed significant data to the study in the course of their engagement in a long-term research platform of the German Research Foundation (DFG). For their study, they removed 'unrealistic' communities from the analysis of data from two large-scale experiments.