Ascendancy vs. Reserve

Why is biodiversity ‘good’? To what extent is this sort of goodness even relevant to ecosystems—as opposed to us humans? I’d like to study this mathematically.

To do this, we’d need to extract some answerable questions out of the morass of subtlety and complexity. For example: what role does biodiversity play in the ability of ecosystems to be robust under sudden changes of external conditions? This is already plenty hard to study mathematically, since it requires understanding ‘biodive...