The University of Tokyo · Environmental Science
Professor Akira Mori's research lab specializes in biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships, with a focus on understanding how ecological diversity sustains ecosystem services across terrestrial systems. The lab investigates the impacts of anthropogenic and natural disturbances on ecosystem stability, particularly through the lens of non-equilibrium dynamics and spatial patterns in biodiversity. Key research directions include the role of species richness and community composition in maintaining multifunctionality, especially in forest ecosystems, and the global-scale effects of plant diversity on critical processes like decomposition. The lab integrates field studies, meta-analyses, and spatial ecology to inform sustainable conservation and forest management strategies.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
A growing body of evidence highlights the importance of biodiversity for ecosystem stability and the maintenance of optimal ecosystem functionality. Conservation measures are thus essential to safeguard the ecosystem services that biodiversity provides and human society needs. Current anthropogenic threats may lead to detrimental (and perhaps irreversible) ecosystem degradation, providing strong motivation to evaluate the response of ecological communities to various anthropogenic pressures. In
Summary Given the substantial contributions of forest biodiversity and ecosystem services to society, forest sciences have a large potential to contribute to the integrity and sustainability of our future. This is especially true when the roles of biodiversity for sustaining ecosystem services are considered. The rapid expansion of sustainable forest management ( SFM ) has resulted in the adoption of various forest management frameworks intended to safeguard biodiversity. Concurrently, the impor
Summary 1. Maintenance of ecological integrity and biodiversity must be based on well‐grounded principles of disturbance ecology. However, non‐equilibrium aspects of ecosystems, such as unpredictability, instability and stochasticity due to various natural disturbances, have not been satisfactorily integrated into practical application. Failure to acknowledge the dynamic nature of systems will inevitably lead to unexpected changes and unachieved conservation goals. 2. This review discusses non‐e
Theory suggests that biodiversity might help sustain multiple ecosystem functions. To evaluate possible biodiversity-multifunctionality relationships in a natural setting, we considered different spatial scales of diversity metrics for soil fungi in the northern forests of Japan. We found that multifunctionality increased with increasing local species richness, suggesting a limited degree of multifunctional redundancy. This diversity-multifunctionality relationship was independent of the composi
Biodiversity loss can alter ecosystem functioning; however, it remains unclear how it alters decomposition-a critical component of biogeochemical cycles in the biosphere. Here, we provide a global-scale meta-analysis to quantify how changes in the diversity of organic matter derived from plants (i.e. litter) affect rates of decomposition. We find that the after-life effects of diversity were significant, and of substantial magnitude, in forests, grasslands, and wetlands. Changes in plant diversi
Abstract Aim Spatial patterns in biodiversity along environmental gradients are a central theme in ecology. However, the ways in which local assembly processes control changes in species turnover (β‐diversity) along broader gradients have been less well documented. In this study, we aimed to elucidate factors and processes governing the altitudinal gradients in the β‐diversity of woody plants and ground‐dwelling oribatid mites. Location S hiretoko N ational P ark in H okkaido, J apan. Methods Th
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