The last 10,000 years on Earth have been marked by unusual stability, a period described by geologists as the Holocene. Relative stability in Holocene atmospheric temperatures, biogeochemical cycles, and freshwater availability have provided the conditions necessary for the development of human civilization. However, the development of industrial agriculture and the burning of fossil fuels have altered the landscape and climate, threatening the stability of global systems. The resulting rapid rates in biodiversity loss surpass safe operating levels for Earth, exceeding other drivers of global change. Yet, how loss of biodiversity interacts with environmental change drivers remains poorly understood, representing a critical knowledge gap facing ecologists. The urgency of this limitation was recently recognized by a targeted funding call by the US National Science Foundation (https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2022/nsf22508/nsf22508.htm). Through this symposium, we seek to bring together ecologists exploring how global change alters the relationship between biodiversity and plant productivity.Increased plant diversity provides many ecosystem services, including increased forage yields, pollinator stability, weed and pest suppression, ecosystem resilience, microclimate stabilization, and erosion mitigation. These services are vital to humanity, providing food, shelter, and material commodities, in addition to innumerable aesthetic and spiritual values. The maintenance of plant diversity is thus key for the survival of our species. The ecosystem benefits of plant biodiversity are strongly related to increases in aboveground productivity. This positive biodiversity-productivity relationship is a fundamental concept in ecology. Understanding the context dependence of this relationship is essential for identifying regions and conditions in which plant biodiversity loss may be particularly problematic. Our goal through this symposium is to bring together researchers exploring the intersection of environmental change and the biodiversity-productivity relationship. The proposed symposium directly addresses the conference theme, exploring the implications of global change on a fundamental concept in ecology. We plan to discuss how the productivity benefits of plant diversity might be altered across systems and under unprecedented environmental change (i.e. altered precipitation, introduction of non-native species).