Quantifying biodiversity and assessing its role in preserving ecosystem functions is essential for mitigating biodiversity loss and sustaining ecosystem services. However, large-scale quantification of plant diversity requires cost-effective and comparable methodologies to enable global and frequent mapping of plant diversity. New methods, such as remote sensing, genomics, or artificial intelligence might enable such global monitoring. This information could be combined with independent measurements or model-based estimates of ecosystem functions to characterize the role of plant diversity in maintaining ecosystem functions and services.
Despite the potential of this approach, numerous conceptual gaps and methodological challenges still need to be overcome. On one side, the new technological alternatives to quantify plant diversity face conceptual and methodological gaps with traditional field ecology. These gaps should be filled, or the limitations of each technology well understood, so that the information provided is adequately used. On the other hand, the analysis of biodiversity-ecosystem functions must account for numerous additional factors to avoid spurious relationships and, therefore, a misunderstood role of how diversity supports ecosystem services.
This session calls for recent studies showing advances in this field. We welcome both specialized and multidisciplinary contributions that advance the estimation of plant diversity and the use of these estimates to assess its role in the stability, resilience, and magnitude of ecosystem functions and services. The session is also open to out-of-the-box approaches and biodiversity studies involving taxa beyond plants.