Departamento de Biología y Geología, Física y Química Inorgánica, Escuela Superior de Ciencias Experimentales y Tecnología, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, 28933, Móstoles, Spain;
Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia, 37005, České Budějovice, Czech Republic.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Sep 29;117(39):24345-24351. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1920405117. Epub 2020 Sep 8.
The stability of ecological communities is critical for the stable provisioning of ecosystem services, such as food and forage production, carbon sequestration, and soil fertility. Greater biodiversity is expected to enhance stability across years by decreasing synchrony among species, but the drivers of stability in nature remain poorly resolved. Our analysis of time series from 79 datasets across the world showed that stability was associated more strongly with the degree of synchrony among dominant species than with species richness. The relatively weak influence of species richness is consistent with theory predicting that the effect of richness on stability weakens when synchrony is higher than expected under random fluctuations, which was the case in most communities. Land management, nutrient addition, and climate change treatments had relatively weak and varying effects on stability, modifying how species richness, synchrony, and stability interact. Our results demonstrate the prevalence of biotic drivers on ecosystem stability, with the potential for environmental drivers to alter the intricate relationship among richness, synchrony, and stability.
生态群落的稳定性对于稳定提供生态系统服务至关重要，例如食物和饲料生产、碳固存和土壤肥力。更高的生物多样性预计将通过降低物种之间的同步性来增强多年来的稳定性，但自然界中稳定性的驱动因素仍未得到很好的解决。我们对来自全球 79 个数据集的时间序列进行的分析表明，稳定性与主要物种之间的同步程度更密切相关，而与物种丰富度关系不大。物种丰富度的影响相对较弱，这与理论预测一致，即在同步性高于随机波动预期的情况下，丰富度对稳定性的影响会减弱，而大多数群落都是如此。土地管理、养分添加和气候变化处理对稳定性的影响相对较弱且各不相同，改变了物种丰富度、同步性和稳定性之间的相互作用方式。我们的研究结果表明，生物驱动因素在生态系统稳定性中普遍存在，环境驱动因素有可能改变丰富度、同步性和稳定性之间复杂的关系。
