Scale dependence of the diversity–stability relationship in a temperate grassland

Zhang, Yunhai; He, Nianpeng; Loreau, Michel; Pan, Qingmin; Han, Xingguo

doi:10.1111/1365-2745.12903

Cited by 42 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…The number of sites per region in our study was positively correlated with region area (r = 0.62) and was the strongest predictor of spatial asynchrony and stability of regional bird biomass ( figure 3). Our study confirms that the importance of spatial asynchrony increases with region size and contributes to a stability-area relationship [29,70,71].…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…Our study provides some of the first evidence to suggest that at macroscales, biomass is stabilized more by spatial variation in biomass fluctuations and species composition than average local stability or species diversity. Moreover, our results suggest recent theory on scaling biodiversity-stability relationships [25,29] (which has mostly been tested with sessile organisms like plants [26,46,47,71]) can be generalized to more mobile consumers like birds.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 55%

“…The total number of sites per region was positively correlated with the total area of a region (r = 0.62). Therefore, the number of sites reflects the net effect of sampling effort and other ecological processes that vary with region area [29,70,71]. We performed variation partitioning using vegan::varpart() in R. Next, we developed a structural equation model to evaluate hypotheses regarding the direct and indirect effects of biodiversity and climate heterogeneity for explaining local stability, spatial asynchrony and regional stability.…”

Section: (D) Statistical Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Local species diversity, β-diversity and climate influence the regional stability of bird biomass across North America

et al. 2020

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Biodiversity often stabilizes aggregate ecosystem properties (e.g. biomass) at small spatial scales. However, the importance of species diversity within communities and variation in species composition among communities (β-diversity) for stability at larger scales remains unclear. Using a continental-scale analysis of 1657 North American breeding-bird communities spanning 20-years and 35 ecoregions, we show local species diversity and β-diversity influence two components of regional stability: local stability (stability of bird biomass within sites) and spatial asynchrony (asynchronous fluctuations in biomass among sites). We found spatial asynchrony explained three times more variation in regional stability of bird biomass than did local stability. This result contrasts with studies at smaller spatial scales-typically plant metacommunities under 1 ha-that find local stability to be more important than spatial asynchrony. Moreover, spatial asynchrony of bird biomass increased with bird β-diversity and climate heterogeneity (temperature and precipitation), while local stability increased with species diversity. Our study reveals new insights into the scale-dependent processes regulating ecosystem stability, providing evidence that both local biodiversity loss and homogenization can destabilize ecosystem processes at biogeographic scales.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 55%

Section: (D) Statistical Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Local species diversity, β-diversity and climate influence the regional stability of bird biomass across North America

et al. 2020

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“…Even if TR at the regional scale directly affects TR at the local scale, it might not influence ecosystem functioning if there is high functional redundancy and/or if local processes strongly limit community diversity (Díaz & Cabido, ). Researchers have begun considering larger spatial scales and similarly identifying impacts of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning (Winfree et al ., ; Zhang et al ., ), but plot sizes remain relatively small (Zavaleta et al ., ). Future studies need to ask how preserving phenotypic diversity at different scales (from global hotspots to local parks) might impact ecosystem functioning at local scales.…”

Section: Evaluating the Arguments For Evolutionary Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the utility of conserving evolutionary history

et al. 2019

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It is often claimed that conserving evolutionary history is more efficient than species‐based approaches for capturing the attributes of biodiversity that benefit people. This claim underpins academic analyses and recommendations about the distribution and prioritization of species and areas for conservation, but evolutionary history is rarely considered in practical conservation activities. One impediment to implementation is that arguments related to the human‐centric benefits of evolutionary history are often vague and the underlying mechanisms poorly explored. Herein we identify the arguments linking the prioritization of evolutionary history with benefits to people, and for each we explicate the purported mechanism, and evaluate its theoretical and empirical support. We find that, even after 25 years of academic research, the strength of evidence linking evolutionary history to human benefits is still fragile. Most – but not all – arguments rely on the assumption that evolutionary history is a useful surrogate for phenotypic diversity. This surrogacy relationship in turn underlies additional arguments, particularly that, by capturing more phenotypic diversity, evolutionary history will preserve greater ecosystem functioning, capture more of the natural variety that humans prefer, and allow the maintenance of future benefits to humans. A surrogate relationship between evolutionary history and phenotypic diversity appears reasonable given theoretical and empirical results, but the strength of this relationship varies greatly. To the extent that evolutionary history captures unmeasured phenotypic diversity, maximizing the representation of evolutionary history should capture variation in species characteristics that are otherwise unknown, supporting some of the existing arguments. However, there is great variation in the strength and availability of evidence for benefits associated with protecting phenotypic diversity. There are many studies finding positive biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships, but little work exists on the maintenance of future benefits or the degree to which humans prefer sets of species with high phenotypic diversity or evolutionary history. Although several arguments link the protection of evolutionary history directly with the reduction of extinction rates, and with the production of relatively greater future biodiversity via increased adaptation or diversification, there are few direct tests. Several of these putative benefits have mismatches between the relevant spatial scales for conservation actions and the spatial scales at which benefits to humans are realized. It will be important for future work to fill in some of these gaps through direct tests of the arguments we define here.

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“…The area-invariability relationship indicates that stability should increase from local to regional scales due to asynchronous and compensatory dynamics among sites within the metacommunity, and also among species within sites (Wang and Loreau, 2014;Zhang et al, 2018). Moreover, increased beta-diversity (i.e.…”

Section: Different Communities Exhibited Similar Initial and Long-termentioning

confidence: 99%

High dimensionality of the stability of a marine benthic ecosystem

Valdivia

Aguilera

Broitman

2020

Preprint

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Stability is a central property of complex systems and encompasses multiple dimensions such as resistance, resilience, recovery, and invariability. How these dimensions correlate among them is focus of recent ecological research; yet, empirical evidence at regional scales, at which conservation decisions are usually made, remains absent. Using a field-based manipulative experiment conducted in two marine intertidal regions, we analyse the correlations among different aspects of stability in functioning (community cover) and composition of local communities facing a press disturbance. The experiment involved the removal of the local space-dominant species for 35 months in eight sites under different environmental regimes in northern- and southern-central Chile (ca. 30°S and 40°S, respectively). After the disturbance, the magnitude of the initial responses and the recovery patterns were similar among communities dominated by different species, but varied between the functional and compositional response variables, and among four dimensions of stability. The recovery trajectories in function and composition remained mostly uncorrelated across the system. Yet, larger initial functional responses were associated with faster recovery trajectories−high functional resilience, in turn, was associated with both, high and low variability in the pattern of recovery. Finally, the compositional stability dimensions were independent from each other. The results suggest that varying community compositions can perform similar levels of functioning, which might be the result of strong compensatory dynamics among species competing for space in these communities. Knowledge of several, and sometimes orthogonal, aspects of stability is mandatory to fully describe the stability of complex ecological systems.

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Scale dependence of the diversity–stability relationship in a temperate grassland

Cited by 42 publications

References 50 publications

Local species diversity, β-diversity and climate influence the regional stability of bird biomass across North America

Local species diversity, β-diversity and climate influence the regional stability of bird biomass across North America

Assessing the utility of conserving evolutionary history

High dimensionality of the stability of a marine benthic ecosystem

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