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Environmental disturbances affect ecosystem functioning through changes in organ­isms’ metabolism (direct effect) and biodiversity loss (indirect or biodiversity-mediated effect). It is still a challenge to separate direct and biodiversity-mediated effects of envi­ronmental changes on ecosystem functioning due to the difficulties in isolating ‘true’ biodiversity loss effects. Furthermore, it is still unclear whether biodiversity-mediated effects are as important as direct effects. In this study, was performed an experiment in artificial microcosms to disentangle biodiversity-mediated and direct effects of two major environmental disturbances on the functioning of aquatic ecosystems: increases in temperature and salinity.

The ecosystem function analyzed was the microalgae pre­dation by the zooplankton community (zooplankton grazing rates) and the results os the study suggest that disturbances can affect the functioning of aquatic environments through a set of complex biological mechanisms that balance direct and biodiversity-mediated effects. We concluded that the relative importance of biodiversity-mediated effects depends on the type and intensity of the disturbance.