Biodiversity-stability Relationships Strengthen over Time in a Long-term Grassland Experiment

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2022 Dec 14

PMID 36517483

Authors

Cameron Wagg

Christiane Roscher

Alexandra Weigelt

Anja Vogel

Anne Ebeling

Enrica de Luca

Anna Roeder

Clemens Kleinspehn

Vicky M Temperton

Sebastian T Meyer

Michael Scherer-Lorenzen

Nina Buchmann

Markus Fischer

Wolfgang W Weisser

Nico Eisenhauer

Bernhard Schmid

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Numerous studies have demonstrated that biodiversity drives ecosystem functioning, yet how biodiversity loss alters ecosystems functioning and stability in the long-term lacks experimental evidence. We report temporal effects of species richness on community productivity, stability, species asynchrony, and complementarity, and how the relationships among them change over 17 years in a grassland biodiversity experiment. Productivity declined more rapidly in less diverse communities resulting in temporally strengthening positive effects of richness on productivity, complementarity, and stability. In later years asynchrony played a more important role in increasing community stability as the negative effect of richness on population stability diminished. Only during later years did species complementarity relate to species asynchrony. These results show that species complementarity and asynchrony can take more than a decade to develop strong stabilizing effects on ecosystem functioning in diverse plant communities. Thus, the mechanisms stabilizing ecosystem functioning change with community age.

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