ArticleEcology letters2016
Biodiversity and ecosystem stability across scales in metacommunities.
Article in Ecology letters, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 78 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
78 citing papers in PubMed.
- From environmental heterogeneity to stability: Beta-diversity stabilizes biomass across space.Ecology · 2026Article
- Fish diversity and community turnover across protection zones in multiuse marine protected areas.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Article
- Scaling biodiversity-stability relationships from populations to meta-communities across trophic levels.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Opposing diversity-stability relationships within versus between aquatic producers and consumers.National science review · 2026Article
- Biodiversity and habitat complexity buffer the destabilizing effects of anthropogenic activities on riverine fish communities.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Portfolio Effects and Synchrony in Coral Communities.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Unravelling Marine Benthic Functioning Shifts Under Ocean Acidification.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Reconciling links between diversity and population stability across global plant communities.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Data deficiency, taxonomic bias, and economic interests curtail insect and arachnid conservation in the United States.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Europe's Ecological Debt: Mapping Freshwater Restoration Needs.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Mammal defaunation leads to biotic homogenization of plant communities in tropical rainforests.Ecology · 2026Article
- Plant diversity within communities, not among them, stabilizes grassland productivity across spatial scales.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Effect of landscape diversity on temporal stability of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index across spatial scales.Oecologia · 2026Article
- Testing whether connectivity stabilizes metacommunities and rescues declining diversity in a 25-y grassland study.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Spatial Insurance of Distinct Ecological Functions.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Soil Disturbance of Plateau Zokor (Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Seasonal asynchrony and harvest diversification contribute to demersal finfish fisheries stability in Chesapeake Bay.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2025Article
- Species richness is an important mediator of multifunctionality changes in Hobq desert shrub ecosystem.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Counteracting Cascades Challenge the Heterogeneity-Stability Relationship.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Article
18 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Although diversity-stability relationships have been extensively studied in local ecosystems, the global biodiversity crisis calls for an improved understanding of these relationships in a spatial context. Here, we use a dynamical model of competitive metacommunities to study the relationships between species diversity and ecosystem variability across scales. We derive analytic relationships under a limiting case; these results are extended to more general cases with numerical simulations. Our model shows that, while alpha diversity decreases local ecosystem variability, beta diversity generally contributes to increasing spatial asynchrony among local ecosystems. Consequently, both alpha and beta diversity provide stabilising effects for regional ecosystems, through local and spatial insurance effects respectively. We further show that at the regional scale, the stabilising effect of biodiversity increases as spatial environmental correlation increases. Our findings have important implications for understanding the interactive effects of global environmental changes (e.g. environmental homogenisation) and biodiversity loss on ecosystem sustainability at large scales.
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Registered trials
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