Consistent stabilizing effects of plant diversity across spatial scales and climatic gradients

Abstract

Biodiversity has widely been documented to enhance local community stability but whether such stabilizing effects of biodiversity extend to broader scales remains elusive. Here, we investigated the relationships between biodiversity and community stability in natural plant communities from quadrat (1 m 2) to plot (400 m 2) and regional (5-214 km 2) scales and across broad climatic conditions, using an extensive plant community dataset from the National Ecological Observatory Network. We found that plant diversity provided consistent stabilizing effects on total community abundance across three nested spatial scales and climatic gradients. The strength of the stabilizing effects of biodiversity increased modestly with spatial scale and decreased as precipitation seasonality increased. Our findings illustrate the generality of diversity-stability theory across scales and climatic gradients, which provides a robust framework for understanding ecosystem responses to biodiversity and climate changes.