Biodiversity stabilizes plant communities through statistical-averaging effects rather than compensatory dynamics.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem stability is a central goal of ecologists. Recent studies have concluded that biodiversity increases community temporal stability by increasing the asynchrony between the dynamics of different species. Theoretically, this enhancement can occur through either increased between-species compensatory dynamics, a fundamentally biological mechanism; or through an averaging effect, primarily a statistical mechanism. Yet it remains unclear which mechanism is dominant in explaining the diversity-stability relationship. We address this issue by mathematically decomposing asynchrony into components separately quantifying the compensatory and statistical-averaging effects. We applied the new decomposition approach to plant survey and ex

SUBMITTER: Zhao L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9759569 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature