Diversity-stability relationships become decoupled across spatial scales: a synthesis of organism and ecosystem types

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe relationship between biodiversity and stability, or its inverse, temporal variability, is multidimensional and complex. Temporal variability in aggregate properties, like total biomass or abundance, is typically lower in communities with higher species diversity (i.e., the diversity-stability relationship or DSR). Recent work has shown that, at broader spatial extents, regional-scale aggregate variability is also lower with higher regional diversity (in plant systems) and with lower spatial synchrony. However, it is not yet clear whether regional DSRs hold across a broad range of organisms and ecosystem types. Furthermore, focusing exclusively on aggregate properties of communities may overlook potentially destabilizing compositional shifts. To test these questions, we compiled a large collection of long-term spatial metacommunity data spanning a wide range of taxonomic groups (e.g., birds, fish, plants, invertebrates) and ecosystem types (e.g., deserts, forests, oceans). We applied a newly developed quantitative framework for jointly analyzing aggregate and compositional variability across scales. We quantified DSRs for composition and total abundance in local communities and metacommunities. At the local scale, compositional DSRs suggested that higher local (α) diversity was associated with lower variability in animal populations but higher variability in plant populations, while aggregate DSRs supported the classic stabilizing effects of diversity. Spatial synchrony differed among taxa (birds had the lowest, plants the highest), suggesting differences in stabilization by spatial processes. Spatial synchrony declined with higher diversity among sites (β) for both compositional and aggregate properties. However, at the regional (γ) scale, we found no aggregate DSR, but a positive compositional DSR. Across a broader range of taxa, our results suggest that high γ-diversity does not consistently stabilize aggregate properties at regional scales without sufficient spatial β-diversity to reduce spatial synchrony.Open research statementAll data sets are accessible via the Environmental Data Initiative, and a specific data package of the data sets used in this analysis will be made publicly available (doi: pending). Citations to original sources are included in Appendix S1. Code to reproduce the analyses is found in a Zenodo archive (doi: pending) of the GitHub repository for this project (https://github.com/sokole/ltermetacommunities/tree/master/Manuscripts/MS3).