Evolution and Biodiversity: the evolutionary basis of biodiversity and its potential for adaptation to global change

Biodiversity has a key role in maintaining healthy ecosystems and thereby sustaining ecosystem services to the ever-growing human population. To get an idea of the range of ecosystem services that we use daily, think of how much energy and time it would cost to make Mars (or some other Earth-like planet) hospitable for human life, for example, in terms of atmosphere regulation, freshwater production, soil formation, nutrient cycles, regulation of climate, etc. On our own planet, that process took four billion years and required the contribution of a vast amount of functions performed by different life forms, ultimately driven by evolution and that is only the top of the (melting) iceberg.
This Special Issue builds on the numerous contributions made during the EPBRS meeting on ‘Evolution and Biodiversity’ (Mallorca, 12–15 April 2010) and the preparatory e-conference chaired by J. Mergeay and managed by F. Grant. The meeting was funded by the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), the Spanish Diversitas Committee and EU-FW6 project BIOSTRAT. A full-report of the e-conference is available at: http://www.epbrs.org/PDF/EvolutionandBiodiversity_longversion_final.pdf. We thank A. Hendry for assistance during the editorial process.