Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: reconciling the results of experimental and observational studies.

The article addresses criticisms of the BIODEPTH project, a biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research in Great Britain. It shows that patterns for legume species are not generally consistent with the multispecies sampling effect for legumes proposed by Huston & McBride in 2002. The BIODEPTH results are not also consistent with transient biodiversity effects. Researchers propose that the conflict in the results of biodiversity experiments and observational biodiversity studies arises because they use different approaches to address different questions.