ArticleEcology letters2017
Asynchrony among local communities stabilises ecosystem function of metacommunities.
Article in Ecology letters, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 56 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
56 citing papers in PubMed.
- Herbivore species asynchrony underpins multitrophic stability across plants, herbivores and predators.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- From environmental heterogeneity to stability: Beta-diversity stabilizes biomass across space.Ecology · 2026Article
- Coupled Atlantic atmosphere-ocean variability modulates cutaneous leishmaniasis in North Africa, enabling long-lead seasonal forecasts.Science advances · 2026Article
- Beyond the Cascade Dams: Scale-Dependent Effects on Zooplankton Stability in River Ecosystems.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Scaling biodiversity-stability relationships from populations to meta-communities across trophic levels.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The theory of island biogeography and the stability of oceanic reef fish communities.Journal of fish biology · 2026Article
- Portfolio Effects and Synchrony in Coral Communities.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Minimizing co-growth as a broad predictor of community robustness.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Community Synchrony in Aquatic Macroinvertebrates Is Unrelated to Environmental Variability but Differs Among Functional Feeding Groups.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Plant diversity within communities, not among them, stabilizes grassland productivity across spatial scales.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Fast seasonal growth promotes regional stability by strengthening local temporal stability in Inner Mongolian grasslands.Frontiers in plant science · 2026Article
- Wetland productivity and stability increase more with average plant size than with plant functional diversity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Spatial resource heterogeneity stabilizes local and regional predator-prey dynamics in ecologically realistic networks.Ecology · 2025Article
- Article
- Counteracting Cascades Challenge the Heterogeneity-Stability Relationship.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Urbanization leads to asynchronous homogenization of soil microbial communities across biomes.Environmental science and ecotechnology · 2025Article
- Interactions among nutrients govern the global grassland biomass-precipitation relationship.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Satellite Remote Sensing Reveals More Beneficial Effect of Forest Plant Diversity on Drought Resistance in More Arid Areas of Yunnan, China.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Understanding diversity-synchrony-stability relationships in multitrophic communities.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Plant diversity increases spatial stability of aboveground productivity in alpine grasslands.Oecologia · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
44 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Temporal stability of ecosystem functioning increases the predictability and reliability of ecosystem services, and understanding the drivers of stability across spatial scales is important for land management and policy decisions. We used species-level abundance data from 62 plant communities across five continents to assess mechanisms of temporal stability across spatial scales. We assessed how asynchrony (i.e. different units responding dissimilarly through time) of species and local communities stabilised metacommunity ecosystem function. Asynchrony of species increased stability of local communities, and asynchrony among local communities enhanced metacommunity stability by a wide range of magnitudes (1-315%); this range was positively correlated with the size of the metacommunity. Additionally, asynchronous responses among local communities were linked with species' populations fluctuating asynchronously across space, perhaps stemming from physical and/or competitive differences among local communities. Accordingly, we suggest spatial heterogeneity should be a major focus for maintaining the stability of ecosystem services at larger spatial scales.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.