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David Tilman, Community Ecology & Biodiversity Section Head in the Ecology Faculty, has taken the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology for scientifically demonstrating how biodiversity makes ecosystems more stable, productive and resilient.

Tilman, Regents professor at the University of Minnesota who also won a Balzan prize last year, published a landmark paper in Nature in 1994 that changed the prevailing opinion that ecosystems did not need to be diverse to be stable. Tilman provided evidence that, in fact, less diverse systems are indeed less stable. Indeed, a severe decline in biodiversity may lead to long-term problems in the quality and functioning of ecosystems.

In their press release, the BBVA singled out his efforts to unravel one of the oldest mysteries in ecological science: how can so many species coexist within a single ecosystem? They highlight that Tilman built “into his theoretical models the idea that each species specializes in what it does best at the expense of other possible uses of its energy, and concluded that it is this trade-off (between, for instance, greater competitive vs. dispersal ability) that permits the coexistence of multiple species.”

Check out Tilman’s interview for the BBVA in which he explains in more detail why biological diversity is so important to ecosystems and ecosystems stability.
Many congratulations, David!