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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.

Integrated omics applied to microbial communities offers a great opportunity to analyze the niche breadths (i.e., resource and condition ranges usable by a species) of constituent populations, ranging from generalists, with a broad niche breadth, to specialists, with a narrow one. In this context, extracellular metabolomics measurements describe resource spaces available to microbial populations; dedicated analyses of metagenomics data serve to describe the fundamental niches of constituent populations, and functional meta-omics becomes a proxy to characterize the realized niches of populations and their variations though time or space. Integrated omics applied to microbial communities offers a great opportunity to analyze the niche breadths (i.e., resource and condition ranges usable by a species) of constituent populations, ranging from generalists, with a broad niche breadth, to specialists, with a narrow one. In this context, extracellular metabolomics measurements describe resource spaces available to microbial populations; dedicated analyses of metagenomics data serve to describe the fundamental niches of constituent populations, and functional meta-omics becomes a proxy to characterize the realized niches of populations and their variations though time or space. Thus, the combination of environmental omics and its thorough interpretation allows us to directly describe niche breadths of constituent populations of a microbial community, precisely and in situ . This will greatly facilitate studies of the causes influencing ecosystem stability, resistance, and resilience, as well as generation of the necessary knowledge to model and predict the fate of any ecosystem in the current context of global change.

Data from experiments that manipulated grassland biodiversity across Europe and North America show that biodiversity increases an ecosystem’s resistance to, although not resilience after, climate extremes. Biodiversity loss threatens ecosystem reliability Tests to establish whether biodiversity buffers ecosystems against extreme climate events have produced strongly contrasting results. Forest Isbell et al . combine data from 46 experiments that manipulated grassland plant diversity and measured productivity across Europe and North America and find that yes, biodiversity does increase an ecosystem's resistance to climate extremes. Plots with just a few species had their productivity reduced by 50% during climate extremes, whereas this effect was halved with a greater number of species. However, biodiversity had no discernible effect on the ecosystem resilience, with both low and high biodiversity treatments recovering from climate extremes within a year. It remains unclear whether biodiversity buffers ecosystems against climate extremes, which are becoming increasingly frequent worldwide 1 . Early results suggested that the ecosystem productivity of diverse grassland plant communities was more resistant, changing less during drought, and more resilient, recovering more quickly after drought, than that of depauperate communities 2 . However, subsequent experimental tests produced mixed results 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 . Here we use data from 46 experiments that manipulated grassland plant diversity to test whether biodiversity provides resistance during and resilience after climate events. We show that biodiversity increased ecosystem resistance for a broad range of climate events, including wet or dry, moderate or extreme, and brief or prolonged events. Across all studies and climate events, the productivity of low-diversity communities with one or two species changed by approximately 50% during climate events, whereas that of high-diversity communities with 16–32 species was more resistant, changing by only approximately 25%. By a year after each climate event, ecosystem productivity had often fully recovered, or overshot, normal levels of productivity in both high- and low-diversity communities, leading to no detectable dependence of ecosystem resilience on biodiversity. Our results suggest that biodiversity mainly stabilizes ecosystem productivity, and productivity-dependent ecosystem services, by increasing resistance to climate events. Anthropogenic environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss thus seem likely to decrease ecosystem stability 14 , and restoration of biodiversity to increase it, mainly by changing the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate events.

1. A growing body of empirical evidence has suggested that biodiversity affects the simultaneous performance of multiple ecosystem functions (i.e. ecosystem multifunctionality). Given increasing environmental variability and uncertainty under global change, an emerging question is how biodiversity influences the stability of multiple functions (i.e. multifunctional stability). We currently know little, however, about the determinants and mechanisms of multifunctional stability, which is of practical importance for ensuring the sustainable provision of multiple functions. 2. Here, we examined mechanisms contributing to stability (quantified as the ratio of the mean to the standard deviation) of multiple functions related to ecosystem productivity and carbon sequestration, including plant above-ground and belowground productivity, litter production, gross primary productivity and ecosystem respiration, in a large grassland biodiversity experiment in Inner Mongolia. 3. We found that community-wide species asynchrony was a strong driver to stabilize multiple functions. Community-wide asynchrony mediated the positive effects of species richness and response diversity (describing how species with similar effects on ecosystem function respond differently to environmental change) on multifunctional stability. However, species richness had a negative direct effect on multifunctional stability because, although it increased the averaged temporal mean of multiple functions, it strongly increased the averaged temporal standard deviation of multiple functions. The overall effects of species richness on multifunctional stability were thus negative, whereas those of response diversity were positive. 4. Synthesis. The studied ecosystem functions related to ecosystem productivity and carbon sequestration are important in natural grasslands across the world. We conclude that species asynchrony and response diversity, rather than species richness, are key to the ecosystem multifunctional stability. The loss of response diversity and compensatory mechanisms would likely reduce the long-term sustainability of grasslands in the face of global change.

Over the last half century, climate change, coral disease, and other anthropogenic disturbances have restructured coral-reef ecosystems on a global scale. The disproportionate loss of once-dominant, reef-building taxa has facilitated relative increases in the abundance of “weedy” or stress-tolerant coral species. Although the recent transformation of coral-reef assemblages is unprecedented on ecological timescales, determining whether modern coral reefs have truly reached a novel ecosystem state requires evaluating the dynamics of reef composition over much longer periods of time. Here, we provide a geologic perspective on the shifting composition of Florida’s reefs by reconstructing the millennial-scale spatial and temporal variability in reef assemblages using 59 Holocene reef cores collected throughout the Florida Keys Reef Tract (FKRT). We then compare the relative abundances of reef-building species in the Holocene reef framework to data from contemporary reef surveys to determine how much Florida’s modern reef assemblages have diverged from long-term baselines. We show that the composition of Florida’s reefs was, until recently, remarkably stable over the last 8000 yr. The same corals that have dominated shallow-water reefs throughout the western Atlantic for hundreds of thousands of years, Acropora palmata, Orbicella spp., and other massive coral taxa, accounted for nearly 90% of Florida’s Holocene reef framework. In contrast, the species that now have the highest relative abundances on the FKRT, primarily Porites astreoides and Siderastrea siderea, were rare in the reef framework, suggesting that recent shifts in species assemblages are unprecedented over millennial timescales. Although it may not be possible to return coral reefs to pre-Anthropocene states, our results suggest that coral-reef management focused on the conservation and restoration of the reef-building species of the past, will optimize efforts to preserve coral reefs, and the valuable ecosystem services they provide into the future.

Ecosystem stability in variable environments depends on the diversity of form and function of the constituent species. Species phenotypes and ecologies are the product of evolution, and the evolutionary history represented by co‐occurring species has been shown to be an important predictor of ecosystem function. If phylogenetic distance is a surrogate for ecological differences, then greater evolutionary diversity should buffer ecosystems against environmental variation and result in greater ecosystem stability. We calculated both abundance‐weighted and unweighted phylogenetic measures of plant community diversity for a long‐term biodiversity–ecosystem function experiment at Cedar Creek, Minnesota, USA. We calculated a detrended measure of stability in aboveground biomass production in experimental plots and showed that phylogenetic relatedness explained variation in stability. Our results indicate that communities where species are evenly and distantly related to one another are more stable compared to communities where phylogenetic relationships are more clumped. This result could be explained by a phylogenetic sampling effect, where some lineages show greater stability in productivity compared to other lineages, and greater evolutionary distances reduce the chance of sampling only unstable groups. However, we failed to find evidence for similar stabilities among closely related species. Alternatively, we found evidence that plot biomass variance declined with increasing phylogenetic distances, and greater evolutionary distances may represent species that are ecologically different (phylogenetic complementarity). Accounting for evolutionary relationships can reveal how diversity in form and function may affect stability.

Although the study of resource subsidies has emerged as a key topic in both ecosystem and food web ecology, the dialogue over their role has been limited by separate approaches that emphasize either subsidy quantity or quality. Considering quantity and quality together may provide a simple, but previously unexplored, framework for identifying the mechanisms that govern the importance of subsidies for recipient food webs and ecosystems. Using a literature review of >90 studies of open-water metabolism in lakes and streams, we show that high-flux, low-quality subsidies can drive freshwater ecosystem dynamics. Because most of these ecosystems are net heterotrophic, allochthonous inputs must subsidize respiration. Second, using a literature review of subsidy quality and use, we demonstrate that animals select for high-quality food resources in proportions greater than would be predicted based on food quantity, and regardless of allochthonous or autochthonous origin. This finding suggests that low-flux, high-quality subsidies may be selected for by animals, and in turn may disproportionately affect food web and ecosystem processes (e.g., animal production, trophic energy or organic matter flow, trophic cascades). We then synthesize and review approaches that evaluate the role of subsidies and explicitly merge ecosystem and food web perspectives by placing food web measurements in the context of ecosystem budgets, by comparing trophic and ecosystem production and fluxes, and by constructing flow food webs. These tools can and should be used to address future questions about subsidies, such as the relative importance of subsidies to different trophic levels and how subsidies may maintain or disrupt ecosystem stability and food web interactions.

Wild and managed pollinators provide a wide range of benefits to society in terms of contributions to food security, farmer and beekeeper livelihoods, social and cultural values, as well as the maintenance of wider biodiversity and ecosystem stability. Pollinators face numerous threats, including changes in land-use and management intensity, climate change, pesticides and genetically modified crops, pollinator management and pathogens, and invasive alien species. There are well-documented declines in some wild and managed pollinators in several regions of the world. However, many effective policy and management responses can be implemented to safeguard pollinators and sustain pollination services. Wild and managed pollinators are threatened by pressures such as environmental changes and pesticides, leading to risks for pollinator-dependent crop production, meaning more research and better policies are needed to safeguard pollinators and their services. Take care of the pollinators Pollinators provide numerous goods and services to society, and help to maintain ecosystem health and function, but their numbers are in decline in several parts of the world. In this Review, Simon Potts et al . synthesize data on the current status of pollinators, outline the main drivers of their decline, and discuss the policy and management intervention that can help to safeguard their survival.

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 experimental data from North American grasslands. We show that statistical averaging, rather than compensatory dynamics, was the principal mediator of biodiversity effects on community stability. Our simple decomposition approach helps integrate concepts of stability, asynchrony, statistical averaging, and compensatory dynamics, and suggests that statistical averaging, rather than compensatory dynamics, is the primary means by which biodiversity confers ecological stability. Positive relationships between biodiversity and temporal stability through species asynchrony are well-documented, but the underlying mechanisms remain debated. Here, the authors show that statistical averaging is the main mechanism of plant diversity effects on community stability.

Temperature and biodiversity changes occur in concert, but their joint effects on ecological stability of natural food webs are unknown. Here, we assess these relationships in 19 planktonic food webs. We estimate stability as structural stability (using the volume contraction rate) and temporal stability (using the temporal variation of species abundances). Warmer temperatures were associated with lower structural and temporal stability, while biodiversity had no consistent effects on either stability property. While species richness was associated with lower structural stability and higher temporal stability, Simpson diversity was associated with higher temporal stability. The responses of structural stability were linked to disproportionate contributions from two trophic groups (predators and consumers), while the responses of temporal stability were linked both to synchrony of all species within the food web and distinctive contributions from three trophic groups (predators, consumers, and producers). Our results suggest that, in natural ecosystems, warmer temperatures can erode ecosystem stability, while biodiversity changes may not have consistent effects. Climate change effects on food webs may be modulated by ecological variables. Here, the authors report how planktonic food web stability depends on temperature and biodiversity, and show that trophic dynamics and synchrony help elucidate the patterns.