Temperature change and biodiversity influence community stability differently in birds and fishes

Abstract

Determining the factors that affect community stability is crucial to understand the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in the face of global warming. We investigated how temperature change affected diversity-synchrony-stability relationships for 1,246 birds and 580 fish communities from temperate regions. We hypothesized temperature change can stabilize communities if species’ variable response to changing median temperature decreases overall community synchrony (H1), and if temperature-extremes reduce interspecific synchrony at extreme abundances due to variation in species’ thermal tolerance limits (H2). We found support for H1 in fish and for H2 in bird communities. We also found that the temperature change components (median, variability, trend, and extremes) impacted stability, predominantly, via affecting the biotic components (diversity, synchrony). Considering different temperature change components in addition to their effects on diversity and synchrony for terrestrial vs. aquatic communities will improve the mechanistic understanding of biodiversity change in response to global climatic stressors.