Ecologists have long recognized the importance of predators in structuring ecological systems, but recent research demonstrates that changes in predator richness – the diversity of predator species, genotypes, and functional assemblages in an ecosystem – may also strongly affect the composition of and population dynamics within ecological communities. In “Cascading effects of predator richness”, a paper published in the December issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, John Bruno and Bradley Cardinale discuss the vital role that predator richness plays in maintaining these communities and their properties, the difficulty in predicting community impacts as a result of changes in predator diversity, and the implications of such changes for biodiversity theory and ecosystem management.

Predation and Prediction [ 14:49 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ever wonder what the experts believe are the biggest problems facing the world today? In this episode of Beyond the Frontier, Dr. Derek Cabrera – lead author of a paper in the November issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment entitled “What is the crisis? Defining and prioritizing the world’s most pressing problems” – and his colleagues set out to try and answer that question. Surveying the entire faculty of Cornell University, the authors asked respondents to identify what, in their opinion, were the most urgent global problems, and to rank them by importance and ability to be solved.

A Global Identity Crisis Play Now | Play in Popup | Download