Understanding diversity-stability relationships: towards a unified model of portfolio effects.

ABSTRACT: A major ecosystem effect of biodiversity is to stabilise assemblages that perform particular functions. However, diversity-stability relationships (DSRs) are analysed using a variety of different population and community properties, most of which are adopted from theory that makes several restrictive assumptions that are unlikely to be reflected in nature. Here, we construct a simple synthesis and generalisation of previous theory for the DSR. We show that community stability is a product of two quantities: the synchrony of population fluctuations, and an average species-level population stability that is weighted by relative abundance. Weighted average population stability can be decomposed to consider effects of the mean-variance scaling of abundance, changes in mean abundance with diver

SUBMITTER: Thibaut LM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3588152 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature