[10] Between 2009 and 2013, Cardinale helped form the U.S. National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), assisting with selection of the core aquatic sites, and serving on the Pacific-Southwest Domain Science Committee.

He was also co-PI with Walter Dodds and Margaret A. Palmer on the proposal that established the Stream Observational and Experimental Network (STREON) – a coordinated set of national climate change experiments that were ultimately eliminated from NEON as part of budget cuts and descoping.

[12] He also received the Burton V. Barnes Award from the Sierra Club in 2015 for his leadership in organizing academic scientists at 13 state-universities in Michigan to speak out against anti-biodiversity legislation that was intended to make state lands more accessible to fracking, lumbering, and mining.

[25][26] In these working groups, Cardinale and his colleagues have assembled extensive datasets of thousands of experiments[27] and observational studies[28][29] that have quantified how changes in biodiversity impact a wide variety of ecological processes and ecosystem services for organisms inhabiting 30 biomes on 5 continents.

In 2012, Cardinale organized and led an invited review for a special issue of Nature dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit in which his colleagues and he synthesized over 1,700 papers that have examined biodiversity's impact on 34 ecosystem goods and services.

[31] He showed that, once hydrologic connectivity is re-established, the vegetation of drained wetlands could be restored from existing seed banks that had survived nearly a hundred years of farming in agricultural soils.

[33] In the early 2010s, Cardinale worked on collaborative projects with biologists and geomorphologists to evaluate the success of gravel augmentation in restoring spawning habitat for endangered Chinook salmon.

Working in a restored section of the Merced River in central California, he and his students demonstrated that gravel augmentation does, in fact, enhance spawning habitat for Chinook.

[34][35] But the practice also leads to abnormally mobile streambeds that can damage salmonid eggs, reduce the abundance and alter the composition of food items, and change feeding rates, survival and growth of native fish, including juvenile salmon that hatch from spawning beds.

He has completed a number of experiments and published several key papers showing that the composition of species in biological communities can be manipulated to maximize removal of pollutants from freshwater.

In 2011, he published a paper in Nature showing that streams managed to maximize biodiversity of algae are more efficient at removing nutrient pollutants like nitrates from the water than less diverse systems.

He and his research group have shown that enhancing plant diversity of native vegetation along streambanks creates complex rooting systems that help reduce the chance of bank sloughing and failure.