Applications of Ecological Stoichiometry for Biodiversity Conservation

Dear Colleagues,

Our world is facing a severe biodiversity crisis, involving species loss and species invasion, due to aggravated climate change and anthropogenic interventions. The ongoing crisis can and will cause profound impacts on ecosystem structures and functioning and the relationships between humans and nature. Deciding how to accurately elaborate and deal with this crisis is of extreme importance and urgency and requires a more mechanistic understanding of the patterns and drivers of biodiversity at both a spatial and temporal level. Ecological stoichiometry, as a classic ecological subject, mainly focuses on the study of an organism’s elemental composition ranging from the scale of the individual, species, population, community, and ecosystem. Stoichiometric characteristics largely determine an organism’s nutrient dynamics and growth rate and regulate species interactions and ecosystem productivity. Therefore, how to apply the ecological stoichiometry theory into studies on biodiversity patterns and conservation is a highly important and novel direction that remains poorly addressed.

In this Special Issue, we mainly explore the following important topics: i) How do the organism stoichiometric characteristics relate to species richness and diversity patterns (i.e., alpha diversity, beta diversity, and gamma diversity) at different spatiotemporal scales? ii) What is the role of stoichiometric characteristics in determining species’ coexistence, interactions, and invasions? iii) How do the stoichiometric characteristics regulate the biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships in various ecosystems? iv) How do human-related biological conservation strategies shape ecological stoichiometric characteristics across different species organization levels and timescales? We encourage studies from all fields with contrasting research tools, including mesocosm experimental studies, field campaigns with traditional plot investigations, and remote sensing techniques, meta-analyses, reviews, and models, to contribute to this Special Issue. We hope this Special Issue can enhance our mechanistic understanding of biodiversity patterns and drivers from the perspectives of stoichiometric characteristics and nutrient use strategies and promote biological conservation, ecological management, climate change mitigation, and sustainable development in the future.

Dr. Zhengbing Yan
Guest Editor

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