Consistently positive effect of species diversity on ecosystem, but not population, temporal stability

Abstract

Despite much recent progress, our understanding of diversity–stability relationships across different study systems remains incomplete. In particular, recent theory clarified that within‐species population stability and among‐species asynchronous population dynamics combine to determine ecosystem temporal stability, but their relative importance in modulating diversity‐ecosystem temporal stability relationships in different ecosystems remains unclear. We addressed this issue with a meta‐analysis of empirical studies of ecosystem and population temporal stability in relation to species diversity across a range of taxa and ecosystems. We show that ecosystem temporal stability tended to increase with species diversity, regardless of study systems. Increasing diversity promoted asynchrony, which, in turn, contributed to increased ecosystem stability. The positive diversity–ecosystem stability relationship persisted even after accounting for the influences of environmental covariates (e.g., precipitation and nutrient input). By contrast, species diversity tended to reduce population temporal stability in terrestrial systems but increase population temporal stability in aquatic systems, suggesting that asynchronous dynamics among species are essential for stabilizing diverse terrestrial ecosystems. We conclude that there is compelling empirical evidence for a general positive relationship between species diversity and ecosystem‐level temporal stability, but the contrasting diversity–population temporal stability relationships between terrestrial and aquatic systems call for more investigations into their underlying mechanisms.

Decoupled responses of above‐ and below‐ground stability of productivity to nitrogen addition at the local and larger spatial scale

“…Our SEM results further showed that the losses of alpha diversity following N addition reduced local scale stability of ANPP by reducing asynchronous dynamics among species and increasing species stability of ANPP, but the role of species asynchrony was stronger than that of species stability, resulting in an overall negative impact of N addition on local stability (Figure 4). These results highlight the importance of plant diversity and asynchronous dynamics among species in driving functional stability (Wang et al, 2021; Xu et al, 2015, 2021), which may help to stabilize ecosystem functioning at larger spatial scales under N addition (Zhang et al, 2019). Although beta diversity decreased with N addition but did not contribute to gamma stability in our ecosystem.…”

Species richness stabilizes productivity via asynchrony and drought-tolerance diversity in a large-scale tree biodiversity experiment

“…We found that communities dominated by stable growing species populations also had a high community stability, but this effect of population stability was unrelated to species richness. Existing studies, particularly from grasslands, reported a preponderance of negative effects of species richness on population stability due to interspecific competition destabilizing interannual species productivity at higher species richness ( 9 , 10 , 12 , 29 ). In this view, compensatory population dynamics should decrease population stability but increase community stability via contributing to increased asynchrony ( 19 , 28 ).…”

The dual nature of metacommunity variability

“…Ecological stability is a fundamental concept to understand both current and future dynamics of ecosystems (MacArthur 1955, May 1973, Grimm and Wissel 1997, Ives and Carpenter 2007. While ecological stability may be quantified in various ways (Donohue et al 2013, Hillebrand et al 2018, Hillebrand and Kunze 2020, White et al 2020), measures of variability through time are one of the most common approaches (Donohue et al 2016, Xu et al 2021). Temporal variability is usually measured by quantifying the temporal coefficient of variation of an aggregate attribute of an ecosystem, such as the total biomass of a given multispecies assemblage (hereafter referred to as aggregate community variability, glossary in Table 1).…”

“…total biomass is less variable through time) due to the higher chance of a diverse community having species with redundant functional contributions to an ecosystem (i.e. compensatory dynamics) (Tilman 1999, Yachi and Loreau 1999, Gonzalez and Loreau 2009, Brown et al 2016, Xu et al 2021). However, communities do not exist in isolation; they are spatially connected via the dispersal of constituent species to form metacommunities over broader regional scales (Leibold et al 2004, Leibold andChase 2018).…”