Everyone talks about biodiversity but doing something about it is not easy. This session is about what ecologists are doing to predict and understand how biodiversity resources respond to change induced by humans. Can we really utilize life on earth while being confident that we also preserve and sustain it? Biodiversity occurs at many levels, from variation among individuals (in behavior, personality, genetics) to species (e.g., in life history variation within and among populations) to communities and ecosystems. Modeling how biodiversity characteristics respond to disturbances from local habitat alteration to global change is a great challenge; traditional system-level models are often not useful because they do not represent either the system’s internal variation that makes up biodiversity or the lower-level processes through which disturbance affects individuals and hence populations and ecosystems. This session provides specific examples and synthesis of how important biodiversity problems are being modeled at various levels. Speakers will address questions such as (1) What are important biodiversity resources, how are they quantified, and how are they affected by human activity? (2) What kinds of models and modeling techniques are useful for predicting and understanding the response of these resources to disturbance, and for understanding how response to disturbance depends on biodiversity? (3) What have we learned so far from these models? The speakers work at a diversity of ecological levels, from individuals to ecosystems. The focus will be on studies and models of specific real systems and management problems, and problems such as: how diversity among individuals affect a population’s response to disturbance, how the response of community structure to habitat alteration emerges from life history differences among its species, how exotic species can alter population responses to disturbance, and how harvest and management methods affect community and ecosystem biodiversity. The session will begin with a historical overview, include an analysis of lessons from the extensive history of biodiversity modeling in forest ecology, and end with a synthesis of methods, successes, and challenges.