Talk:Disturbances, biodiversity changes and ecosystem stability

The usefulness of including pages like this one into the Coastal Wike should be carefully reconsidered. This page is constructed as a series of extracts from the report of the Network of Excellence MARBEF (Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning). The text is useful as a report on the activities of this project, and it sure contains elements of value in a more general discussion on the effects of disturbance to ecosystems, including the role played by biodiversity in the response. However, it is by no means a generic treatment of this problem. In order to achieve that, different lines of evidence should be compiled, compared and discussed. Rather, this article contains the results of more or less specific studies on rocky shores. Some are based on relatively limited experiments, others on meta-analyses of many datasets. Hence the relative weight of the different results for drawing general conclusion is also unequal.

All in all, if the coastal Wiki were to contain a generic page discussing "Disturbance, biodiversity change and ecosystem stability", the resulting page would refer to the MARBEF booklet but also to many more sources. However, then this page would no longer have a place in the summary of the MARBEF project, accessed through the (apparently fossilized) MARBEF portal available on the Wiki.

My advice is not to edit this page but delete it. Add the MARBEF report as a pdf to the Wiki and probably refer to it from a diversity of pages, but do not cut it up in different pages suggesting to do more than they can actually do. As a corollary: start new pages discussing disturbance, biodiversity change and ecosystem stability.

Job Dronkers: Several critical comments of the reviewer have been addressed in a new version if this article.