Publications by authors named "Sebastian A Heilpern"
Article Synopsis
- Global biodiversity that supports wild food systems, particularly fisheries, is declining, and understanding how households benefit from this biodiversity is crucial for food and nutrition security.
- A study in Cambodia's Tonlé Sap examined how ecosystem biodiversity affects household catch, consumption, and sale of various species, revealing that households consumed a significant portion of the ecosystem's species, despite selling only a small fraction.
- Results showed that poorer households tended to consume more species, emphasizing the importance of wild food systems for vulnerable populations and raising concerns about the implications of biodiversity loss on global food systems.
The Amazon River Basin's extraordinary social-ecological system is sustained by various water phases, fluxes, and stores that are interconnected across the tropical Andes mountains, Amazon lowlands, and Atlantic Ocean. This "Andes-Amazon-Atlantic" (AAA) pathway is a complex hydroclimatic system linked by the regional water cycle through atmospheric circulation and continental hydrology. Here, we aim to articulate the AAA hydroclimate pathway as a foundational system for research, management, conservation, and governance of aquatic systems of the Amazon Basin.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpecies, through their traits, influence how ecosystems simultaneously sustain multiple functions. However, it is unclear how trait diversity sustains the multiple contributions biodiversity makes to people. Freshwater fisheries nourish hundreds of millions of people globally, but overharvesting and river fragmentation are increasingly affecting catches.
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- * This study analyzes data from the Amazon River Basin to reveal patterns of fish exploitation, showing a trend where larger, abundant fish are replaced by smaller, faster-growing species due to multi-species harvesting.
- * The findings indicate that while fisheries can maintain harvest levels temporarily, the reduction in biodiversity weakens the resilience of these fisheries, highlighting the importance of species variety in preventing fishery collapse.
Article Synopsis
- - Proposed hydropower dams in the Amazon Basin need careful consideration of environmental trade-offs, as the ecosystem services provided by this diverse area can be affected differently depending on dam placements.
- - Multiobjective optimization is utilized to find a balance that minimizes negative impacts on essential aspects like river flow, fish diversity, and greenhouse gas emissions while still achieving energy production targets.
- - Uncoordinated dam construction has led to lost ecosystem benefits, highlighting the need for collaborative approaches among Amazonian countries to better manage hydropower development across the entire region.
Plant diversity has a positive influence on the number of ecosystem functions maintained simultaneously by a community, or multifunctionality. While the presence of multiple trophic levels beyond plants, or trophic complexity, affects individual functions, the effect of trophic complexity on the diversity-multifunctionality relationship is less well known. To address this issue, we tested whether the independent or simultaneous manipulation of both plant diversity and trophic complexity impacted multifunctionality using a mesocosm experiment from Cedar Creek, Minnesota, USA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough biodiversity loss adversely influences a variety of ecosystem functions, how declining wild food diversity affects nutrient supplies for people is poorly understood. Here, we analyze the impact of declining biodiversity on nutrients supplied by fish using detailed information from the Peruvian Amazon, where inland fisheries provide a critical source of nutrition for many of the region's 800,000 people. We found that the impacts of biodiversity loss on nutrient supplies depended on compensation, trophic dynamics, and functional diversity.
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- Declining wild fisheries have led to using farmed animals like chicken to maintain nutrient supplies, but this shift could worsen iron deficiencies and limit essential fatty acids in vulnerable populations like those in the Peruvian Amazon.
- While substituting wild fish with chicken can boost zinc and protein levels, it also raises concerns about increased greenhouse gas emissions and land use.
- Effective policies should focus on sustainable management of wild fisheries while also improving the quality and environmental impact of farmed species to support healthier food systems.
Changes in biodiversity can severely affect ecosystem functioning, but the impacts of species loss on an ecosystem's ability to sustain multiple functions remain unclear. When considering individual functions, the impacts of biodiversity loss depend on correlations between species functional contributions and their extinction probabilities. When considering multiple functions, the impacts of biodiversity loss depend on correlations between species contributions to individual functions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcosystems vary widely in their responses to biodiversity change, with some losing function dramatically while others are highly resilient. However, generalizations about how species- and community-level properties determine these divergent ecosystem responses have been elusive because potential sources of variation (e.g.
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