ArticleNature communications2016
Land use imperils plant and animal community stability through changes in asynchrony rather than diversity.
Article in Nature communications, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers.
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Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed.
- Response diversity increases functional but decreases compositional stability of grassland communities.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Beyond the Cascade Dams: Scale-Dependent Effects on Zooplankton Stability in River Ecosystems.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Distance to central-place drives species-specific habitat selection in sympatric insectivorous birds.Movement ecology · 2026Article
- Species Accumulation Stabilizes the Synchronous Responses to the Environment of Vertebrate Communities Worldwide.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Reconciling links between diversity and population stability across global plant communities.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Disentangling the effects of multifunctional forestry practices on the abundances of birds and their invertebrate prey.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2026Article
- Distance-decay reveals contrasting effects of land-use types on arthropod community homogenisation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Asynchrony and functional diversity couple herbivore community dynamics to host plant diversity.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Arthropod species loss underpins biomass declines.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Different patterns, but no temporal decline in temperate forest soil meso- and macrofauna over the last decade.Ecology · 2025Article
- Decoupling Between Functional Diversity and Stability of Decomposer Functions in Natural and Agroecosystems Can Favor Resistance to Land-Use Change.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Reduced temporal turnover in carabid communities enhances biomass stability in agricultural landscapes.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Thresholds of functional trait diversity driven by land use intensification.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Environmental Gradients Linked to Human Impacts, Not Species Richness, Drive Regional Variation in Community Stability in Coral Reef Fishes.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Functional traits mediate the effect of land use on drivers of community stability within and across trophic levels.Science advances · 2025Article
- Accounting for effects of growth rate when measuring ecological stability in response to pulse perturbations.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Marine protected areas promote stability of reef fish communities under climate warming.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Species asynchrony stabilizes productivity over 20 years in Northeast China.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Common seed dispersers contribute most to the persistence of a fleshy-fruited tree.Communications biology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human land use may detrimentally affect biodiversity, yet long-term stability of species communities is vital for maintaining ecosystem functioning. Community stability can be achieved by higher species diversity (portfolio effect), higher asynchrony across species (insurance hypothesis) and higher abundance of populations. However, the relative importance of these stabilizing pathways and whether they interact with land use in real-world ecosystems is unknown. We monitored inter-annual fluctuations of 2,671 plant, arthropod, bird and bat species in 300 sites from three regions. Arthropods show 2.0-fold and birds 3.7-fold higher community fluctuations in grasslands than in forests, suggesting a negative impact of forest conversion. Land-use intensity in forests has a negative net impact on stability of bats and in grasslands on birds. Our findings demonstrate that asynchrony across species--much more than species diversity alone--is the main driver of variation in stability across sites and requires more attention in sustainable management.
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