The Response Diversity Network

The Response Diversity Network is a community of researchers working on a deceptively simple question: what is response diversity, why does it matter, and what should the field prioritise next?

Response diversity — the idea that different species or organisms respond differently to the same environmental change — is increasingly framed as a sustainability strategy: it’s part of why ecosystem services can keep being delivered even as conditions shift, since not everything fails at once.

The network runs regular seminars with researchers presenting on biodiversity–stability relationships, species traits, and ecosystem resilience; maintains a shared Zotero library of response-diversity-related papers; organises symposia at conferences including GfO, BES, and ESJ; and sends out a quarterly newsletter. A steering committee has been in place since November 2022, with a new leadership team as of this year.

This group contributes to the network’s work on turning response diversity research into concrete opportunities for policy- and decision-makers — one strand of the broader push to make response diversity a genuinely useful concept outside academic ecology, not just inside it.