The spatial synchrony of species richness and its relationship to ecosystem stability.

ABSTRACT: Synchrony is broadly important to population and community dynamics due to its ubiquity and implications for extinction dynamics, system stability, and species diversity. Investigations of synchrony in community ecology have tended to focus on covariance in the abundances of multiple species in a single location. Yet, the importance of regional environmental variation and spatial processes in community dynamics suggests that community properties, such as species richness, could fluctuate synchronously across patches in a metacommunity, in an analog of population spatial synchrony. Here, we test the prevalence of this phenomenon and the conditions under which it may occur using theoretical simulations and empirical data from 20 marine and terrestrial metacommunities. Additionally, given the

SUBMITTER: Walter JA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9286696 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature