I read this paper (Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity; Thomson et al. 2012 Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 27(12):689-697) with great interest because the title is really promising. Indeed it is nice overview of what’s out there in terms of network and functioning, but not much reconciliation. First I have the feeling that community ecologists (even if they don’t use network metrics) are already (and have been for a long time) on the framework they describe in Table 1C. But my main concern is that I missed an answer to the question: What can a network approach add to the study of ecosystem functioning?
Well, I have two ideas that can help answering that.
1) Network approach can be very useful when the function itself is defined by the network. If you are studying pollination or pest control, the actual function delivered is contained in the network structure, hence species richness, diversity or composition (or new metrics, like FD) can be unable to fully explain functionality because what confers high levels of function (or stability) to the community is the network properties (e.g if it’s modular, generalized or well connected). I know some pople is on that path, so I am looking forward to see what they find.
2) Another situation where networks can make the difference is when indirect interactions modulate the function, but are too complex to track them one by one. Networks can describe better phenomenons like apparent competition or cascading effects than any other classical approach. If this type of complex interactions are relevant for the level of functioning measured (e.g. productivity of the basal level), then, adding the network perspective can be more informative than classical approaches.
May be what I am saying is too obvious, so the authors didn’t cover it, or I may be missing something, but this is the direction I would like to see things moving.
Bartomeus lab 
I’ll try not to come across as someone defending the Thompson paper too much (a few colleagues in the authors), though I think it’s a great one. In any case: we are still without a connection between BEF relationship and network structure because we don’t have a mechanism to unify the two fields. We have a paper coming up in Ecol Lett (currently in production) which attempts to solve the problem. Basically, the network approach is super important to the BEF (but I’m a network ecologist, so of course I’m going to say that) because you can integrate trophic complexity. Not in the sense of adding a predator in a two consumers system, but in realistically complex communities. So far, predicting the BEF in these was difficult. I’ll be sure to send you the paper once it’s out!
Please do! I am looking forward to read it.