Africa’s wildlife has lost a third of its ‘ecological power,’ study says

It’s a fundamental question for ecologists in this age: How are biodiversity losses reshaping how ecosystems function? A recent study quantifies the impact of biodiversity and abundance losses on ecological functions by tracking the energy flows within them. “African wildlife has lost a third of its ecological power — the energy that drives vital ecosystem functions such as nutrient cycling, seed dispersal, and carnivory or pest control,” Ty Loft, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford, U.K., and first author of the paper published in the journal Nature, told Mongabay by email. Conventional approaches that focus only on species abundance can tell us how animal populations have changed, for example, to what extent elephant numbers have fallen in a given region. But translating