Species Richness and the Temporal Stability of Biomass Production: A New Analysis of Recent Biodiversity Experiments

Abstract

The relationship between biological diversity and ecological stability has fascinated ecologists for decades. Determining the generality of this relationship, and discovering the mechanisms that underlie it, are vitally important for ecosystem management. Here, we investigate how species richness affects the temporal stability of biomass production by reanalyzing 27 recent biodiversity experiments conducted with primary producers. We find that, in grasslands, increasing species richness stabilizes whole-community biomass but destabilizes the dynamics of constituent populations. Community biomass is stabilized because species richness impacts mean biomass more strongly than its variance. In algal communities, species richness has a minimal effect on community stability because richness affects the mean and variance of biomass nearly equally. Using a new measure of synchrony among species, we find that for both grasslands and algae, temporal correlations in species biomass are lower when species are grown together in polyculture than when grown alone in monoculture. These results suggest that interspecific interactions tend to stabilize community biomass in diverse communities. Contrary to prevailing theory, we found no evidence that species' responses to environmental variation in monoculture predicted the strength of diversity's stabilizing effect. Together, these results deepen our understanding of when and why increasing species richness stabilizes community biomass.

Application and Optimization of Biolog EcoPlates in Functional Diversity Studies of Soil Microbial Communities

“…Biodiversity is significant to human, many studies [1][2][3] showed a close relationship between the biological diversity and the ecosystem stability. Lots of studies on flora and fauna diversity, however, we just have little known on microbial diversity due to the limitations of methodology [4].…”

Biodiversity increases the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate extremes

“…Biodiversity stabilizes ecosystem productivity over time 9,[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] ; however, it remains unclear whether it does so by providing resistance during climate events, resilience (sensu rapid recovery 24 ) after climate events, or both (Extended Data Fig. 1).…”

Biodiversity promotes primary productivity and growing season lengthening at the landscape scale

“…ecosystem function and services | EVI and NDVI land surface phenology | large spatial scale | nonexperimental, real-world ecosystems | plant, bird, and butterfly species richness F ield and laboratory studies in which the diversity of plant species was experimentally manipulated have demonstrated that species loss can decrease many ecosystem functions including primary productivity (1) and its temporal stability (2). These biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) studies have revealed generally positive effects of species richness on primary productivity and also shed light on the mechanisms that promote productivity under these conditions (3).…”