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A key question in ecological research is whether biodiversity is important for ecosystem functioning. After approximately three decades of empirical studies on this topic, it is clear that biodiversity promotes the magnitude and stability of ecosystem functioning. However, the majority of early biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) experiments concluded that there is a saturating relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, seemingly supporting the ‘redundancy hypothesis’ of biodiversity. This hypothesis may suggest that many species can be lost from an ecosystem before any changes in functioning can be detected under the current environmental conditions. Here, we argue that the term functional redundancy (1) may have been overused from an ecological perspective and (2) can be dangerous and misleading in scientific communication. Rather, we propose to use the term ‘functional similarity’, which better highlights the unique contributions of all coexisting species to ecosystem functioning, gradients in niche overlap and has a less negative connotation. In a world where increasing anthropogenic stressors are accelerating biodiversity change and loss and thus threatening ecosystem integrity, important political and societal decisions must be taken to combat the joint climate and biodiversity crisis. We should therefore reconsider and carefully choose terminology in biodiversity science for value-neutral communication. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. We acknowledge support by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, funded by the German Research Foundation (FZT 118). The Jena Experiment is funded by the German Research Foundation (FOR 5000). F.T.M. acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (EUR2022-134048) and Generalitat Valenciana (CIDEGENT/2018/041).

Following our participation in the first World Biodiversity Forum in Davos, Switzerland, we provide a summary of the main themes of the conference, as well as an overview of the session that was focused on soil biodiversity. One of the main themes of the conference was the valuation of biodiversity and what contributes to the value of biodiversity. In this article we explore whether we should move away from the notion that we can only ‘sell’ soil biodiversity based on the function and services it provides, and rather shift towards valuing soil biodiversity based on its intrinsic value and our relationship with it.

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