Our ability to conserve biodiversity depends on our understanding of the functional relationships between components of ecosystems, an understanding which is surprisingly scant, given the importance of biodiversity to human utilisation of ecosystem products.

We adopt complementary approaches, which will facilitate understanding of biodiversity across the hierarchy of biological organisation. These levels range from the molecular level, interaction between individuals of one species or population with another, to scaling-up these relationships to produce general predictions about the behaviour of the whole system.