Why are plant communities stable? Disentangling the role of dominance, asynchrony and averaging effect following realistic species loss scenario

作者：Aleš Lisner, Jules Segrestin, Marie Konečná, Petr Blažek, Eva Janíková, Markéta Applová, Tereza Švancárová, Jan Lepš · 发表于：Journal of Ecology · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1111/1365-2745.14364 · 被引用次数：28 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Plant and animal studies、Animal Ecology and Behavior Studies

Abstract A growing number of studies have demonstrated that biodiversity is a strong and positive predictor of ecosystem temporal stability by simultaneously affecting multiple underlying mechanisms of stability, that is dominance, asynchrony and averaging effects. However, to date, no study has disentangled the relative role of these key mechanisms of stability in biodiversity experiments. We created a species richness gradient by mimicking a loss of rare species and assessed the role of species richness on community stability and, more importantly, quantified the relative role of three stabilizing mechanisms, that is dominance (stabilization due to stable dominants compared to the rest of the species in the community), asynchrony (stabilization due to temporal asynchrony between species), and averaging effects (pure effect of diversity) on community stability across a species richness gradient. We found that extreme species loss negatively impacted community stability, but just three species were enough to stabilize biomass production to a level similar to highly diverse communities. However, the similar stability of communities resulted from differing contributions from each stabilizing mechanism, depending on the community diversity. Since less abundant species were more temporally variable, species loss stabilized the populations of the remaining species. The loss of rare and subordinate species reduced the dominance and averaging effects, but increased the asynchrony ef...