Agrobiodiversity: Restoring human health as a principle ecosystem function in the Millenium Village of Kenya

Theoretical ecology, particularly recent work on functional richness and ecosystem function has advanced the notion that species richness has an important effect on ecosystem functioning. However, the concept of functional diversity still has not been applied in restoration or development settings because of the difficulty of acquiring accurate, and meaningful trait data tied to the species and ecosystem function in question. He we use a measure of functional diversity (FD) developed by Petchey and Gaston (2002) on field and nutritional data from 30 farms of the Millennium Village Project in Sauri, Kenya to demonstrate how functional diversity can be applied to maximize human nutrition, a critical but often overlooked ecosystem function. We also demonstrate how cross-disciplinary studies advance theoretical ecology by providing access to more readily available data sources. In this study, we use nutritional content of 30 crops commonly cultivated in Sauri as our species trait data to model the relationship between crop functional richness and human nutrition. We also demonstrate that while single species may optimize the provisioning of single ecosystem functions (a selection effect), multiple species are required to maintain multiple functions simultaneously. That is, community redundancy decreases with increasing number of ecosystem functions included in the analysis.