How do biodiversity effects scale from local, short term experiments to observations at policy relevant scale in the natural world?
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I am co-leading a working group funded by NSF's Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) program and National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis on this very topic. Our working group, entitled Scaling up Productivity Responses to changes in Biodiversity, or SCUBA (Scaling Up Biodiversity Analyses!) if you prefer, is approaching the issue of how we can make policy recommendations for where, when, why, and how much biodiversity is needed to maintain a sustainably functioning earth. We are looking at it through multiple lenses - building up from experimental results, scaling down from global observational datasets, and ensuring we are utilizing the correct tools to credibly infer causal relationships in these complicated systems.
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In addition to the lenses described above, we can leverage remotely sensed imagery to help answer this question. The PDF below shows early results that were presented in July 2019 at the University of Zurich's Global Change and Biodiversity conference at Monte Verità in Switzerland.