Temporal Decoupling of Biodiversity Effects on Grassland Productivity and Stability.

Authors

Bo Meng, Yuanyuan Huang, Christiane Roscher, Takehiro Sasaki, Shaopeng Wang, Nico Eisenhauer

Published in

Ecology letters. Volume 29. Issue 9. Pages e70451.

Abstract

One key unresolved question in ecology is what drives temporal trends in biodiversity-stability relationships and how these trends link to ecosystem functioning. This knowledge gap reflects a limited understanding of interspecific interactions in biodiversity-stability relationships. Using plant productivity data from a 20-year grassland biodiversity experiment, complemented by a paired 5-year experiment that controlled for legacy effects, we disentangled the contributions of species-specific dynamics and interaction-dependent processes to plant community stability. Over 20 years, the stabilising effects of biodiversity strengthened, driven mainly by increasing asynchrony in species-specific dynamics rather than shifts in interaction-dependent effects. While biodiversity's stabilising effect initially increased alongside productivity, this coupling weakened over time as interaction-dependent effects on productivity and stability became decoupled. Our findings reveal the dynamic nature of biodiversity effects on plant community stability, underscoring the importance of understanding long-term ecosystem trajectories.

PMID:
42723146
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 11 Sep 2026.

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