OPUS: Lessons Learned From Model Tropical Ecosystems

该项目建立在哥斯达黎加热带低地13年的实地研究基础上，将生物多样性与生态系统功能联系起来。实地研究涉及实验生态系统，这些实验生态系统足够复杂，足以揭示多样性的作用，但也足够简单，以便科学家能够理解负责观察的过程。这项研究的目的是获得进一步的、更综合的见解和理解单个植物物种和植物物种组合之间的关系，以及影响生态系统持续能力的因素。这将通过综合项目出版物中报告的结果以及对土壤和植被数据的新分析来完成。这项研究结果将通过针对相对广泛的读者的出版物广泛传播。这些出版物将描述研究对土地利用和生态系统过程恢复的影响，并将整个系统的营养状况与生产力、淋滤和资源分配联系起来。研究结果适用于对社会具有重要意义的生态问题，包括设计可持续的土地利用系统和生态系统恢复。通过理解所涉及的机制和过程，资源管理人员将提高归纳和避免将每种情况视为唯一的能力。

Building on 13 years of field research in the tropical lowlands of Costa Rica, this project relates biological diversity to ecosystem functioning. Field studies involved experimental ecosystems that were complex enough to reveal the role of diversity, yet simple enough so that scientists could understand the processes responsible for observations. The objective of this research is to gain further, more synthetic, insights and understanding of the relationships among individual plant species and combinations of plant species, and factors that influence an ecosystem's capacity to be sustained. This will be accomplished by integrating results reported in the project's publications together with new analyses of data on soils and vegetation. The research will result in wide dissemination of findings through publications that target relatively broad audiences. Those publications will describe the implications of the research for land use and restoration of ecosystem processes and will couple whole-system nutrient status to productivity, leaching, and resource partitioning. The findings are applicable to ecological issues of importance to society, including the design of sustainable systems of land use and ecosystem restoration. By understanding the mechanisms and processes involved resource managers will have improved ability to generalize and avoid having to treat each situation as unique.