Changes in community assembly may shift the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function

dilution effect Can differences in community assembly alter the relationship between biodiver-sity and ecosystem function? Pholchan et al. (2013) used a variety of manipu-lations to change microbial community assembly in sludge reactors and exam-ined the subsequent links between diver-sity and a rare function, the removal of endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs). Interestingly, the authors saw no consis-tent differences between shifts in alpha diversity (e.g., species richness and even-ness) and ecosystem function, observing an increase, decrease and no difference in