"An exciting, timely, and unique book by a powerful team of authors. No other text competes with it. It will be the standard reference on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning for the next five, even ten years."—John H. Lawton, Chief Executive, Natural Environment Research Council, United Kingdom "This book, written by superb authors, fills a major need in ... Read morethat it unites a discussion of pioneering research on the role of biodiversity in ecosystem function and relates these experiments to a common theoretical framework. The idea of bringing to bear a standardized and commonly accepted ecosystem function model on the biodiversity question is ingenious and of great value."—Peter Kareiva, Lead Scientist, The Nature Conservancy "This exceptionally well-edited book summarizes, successfully, our current knowledge on the ecosystem functioning of biodiversity. It does much more, however: through the clever use of a standard model to explore various aspects of the issue, it greatly extends our understanding. The authors, who are all at the top of their fields, provide a wonderfully creative and useful analysis that goes a long way to explaining the true nature of the controversy that has plagued the field in the past couple of years. The Functional Consequences of Biodiversity provides a well-marked path for future work."—Harold Mooney, Stanford University Show Less