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Synchrony and tail-dependent synchrony have different effects on the stability of terrestrial and freshwater communities
  • +12
  • Shyamolina Ghosh,
  • Blake Matthews,
  • Sarah Supp,
  • Roel Van Klink,
  • Francesco Pomati,
  • James Rusak,
  • Imran Khaliq,
  • Niklaus Zimmermann,
  • Thomas Wohlgemuth,
  • Ole Seehausen,
  • Christian Rixen,
  • Martin Gossner,
  • Anita Narwani,
  • Jonathan Chase,
  • Catherine Graham
Shyamolina Ghosh
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research WSL

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Blake Matthews
Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology
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Sarah Supp
Denison University
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Roel Van Klink
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
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Francesco Pomati
Eawag Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology
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James Rusak
Queen's University
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Imran Khaliq
Eawag Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology
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Niklaus Zimmermann
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research WSL
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Thomas Wohlgemuth
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research WSL
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Ole Seehausen
Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology
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Christian Rixen
WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF
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Martin Gossner
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research WSL
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Anita Narwani
Eawag Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology
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Jonathan Chase
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
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Catherine Graham
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research WSL
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Abstract

Global change alters the stability of biological communities by affecting species richness and how species covary through time (i.e., synchrony). There are few large-scale empirical tests of stability-diversity-synchrony relationships and those mostly focus on the terrestrial realm. Moreover, the effect of synchrony is largely unknown when species only covary at either high or low extremes of abundance (i.e., tail-dependent synchrony), a common phenomenon in ecological communities. Here, we synthesized long-term community time-series data (20+ years of species’ abundances/biomass for 2,668 communities across 7 taxonomic groups) from both terrestrial and freshwater realms and explored how the relationships among richness, synchrony, and stability vary across realms. We also investigated the effect of tail-dependent synchrony on stability across 714 freshwater and 1,954 terrestrial communities. For terrestrial communities, we found a positive diversity-stability relationship and that the tail-dependent synchrony was a more important determinant of stability than the traditional measure of overall synchrony (i.e., based on the covariation of all species). For freshwater communities, only overall synchrony explained some variation in stability. Assessing tail-dependent synchrony can improve our ability to understand why stability varies across different ecosystems and thereby our inferences about the causes of human-mediated biodiversity loss.