Understanding how biodiversity shapes ecosystem functioning is a central question in ecology, yet many unknowns remain regarding its role in buffering ecosystems against environmental stress. Global changes such as climate warming, extreme weather events, and eutrophication are increasingly threatening the stability and functioning of ecosystems. This session will explore whether, when, and how biodiversity, particularly plant diversity, modulates ecosystem processes and resilience under such stresses.

To deepen our understanding of biodiversity - ecosystem functioning relationships under environmental stress, we invite contributions focusing on various scales and approaches. This includes plot-level experiments revealing mechanistic processes, regional and global datasets uncovering broad patterns, and conceptual and methodological advances. We particularly welcome studies addressing:
• Interactive effects of multiple, co-occurring stressors on biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships
• The mechanisms by which plant diversity influences resistance, recovery, and longer term stability of ecosystem functioning under stress, including elucidating thresholds and nonlinear responses
• Scale dependence in space and time of biodiversity–stability relationships
• Syntheses and comparisons revealing generalities or context dependencies

By integrating insights across scales and stressor types, this session will evaluate the robustness of biodiversity’s contribution to ecosystem resilience, giving a synthesis of current understanding and identifying key knowledge gaps to guide future research. The discussions in the session will also be relevant for biodiversity management and for improving predictions of biodiversity loss impacts under ongoing global changes.