Abstract
There is increasing interest in measuring ecological stability to understand how communities and ecosystems respond to broad‐scale global changes. One of the most common approaches is to quantify the variation through time in community or ecosystem aggregate attributes (e.g. total biomass), referred to as aggregate variability. It is now widely recognized that aggregate variability represents only one aspect of communities and ecosystems, and compositional variability, the changes in the relative frequency of species in an assemblage, is equally important. Recent contributions have also begun to explore ecological stability at regional spatial scales, where interconnected local communities form metacommunities, a key concept in managing complex landscapes. However, the conceptual frameworks and measures of ecological stability in space have only focused on aggregate variability, leaving a conceptual gap. Here, we address this gap with a novel framework for quantifying the aggregate and compositional variability of communities and ecosystems through space and time. We demonstrate that the compositional variability of a metacommunity depends on the degree of spatial synchrony in compositional trajectories among local communities. We then provide a conceptual framework in which compositional variability of 1) the metacommunity through time and 2) among local communities combine into four archetype scenarios: spatial stasis (low/low), spatial synchrony (high/low), spatial asynchrony (high/high) and spatial compensation (low/high). We illustrate this framework based on numerical examples and a case study of a macroalgal metacommunity in which low spatial synchrony reduced variability in aggregate biomass at the metacommunity scale, while masking high spatial synchrony in compositional trajectories among local communities. Finally, we discuss the role of dispersal, environmental heterogeneity, species interactions and suggest future avenues. We believe this framework will be helpful for considering both aspects of variability simultaneously, which is important to better understand ecological stability in natural and complex landscapes in response to environmental changes.
Highlights
Ecological stability is a fundamental concept to understand both current and future dynamics of ecosystems (MacArthur 1955, May 1973, Grimm and Wissel 1997, Ives and Carpenter 2007)
In our empirical study of an understory marine macroalgal metacommunity (Fig. 3), we found that compositional variability of the metacommunity was relatively high and exhibited large shifts in species assemblages that would have been undetected from investigating total biomass alone (Fig. 3B)
The metric of spatial compositional synchrony we presented here, BDjh, is a more integrative measure that directly quantifies how variability scales from local-scale populations to the metacommunity
Summary
Ecological stability is a fundamental concept to understand both current and future dynamics of ecosystems (MacArthur 1955, May 1973, Grimm and Wissel 1997, Ives and Carpenter 2007). Compositional variability reflecting rapid changes in species composition through time due to compensatory dynamics can directly decrease aggregate variability (Hillebrand et al 2018) This dual nature of community variability is well recognized and investigated in depth (White et al 2020), the scaling of variability in space has only focused on aggregate variability leaving a conceptual gap in our understanding of temporal variability at the broader spatial scales at which metacommunities operate. Building on these local-scale frameworks (Micheli et al 1999, Hillebrand et al 2018, Hillebrand and Kunze 2020), we address this knowledge gap by extending the concepts of aggregate and compositional variability to regional scales. Less attention has been given to variation in species composition through time (Adler et al 2005, Hillebrand et al 2010, Magurran et al 2018, De Cáceres et al 2019, Legendre 2019, Tatsumi et al 2021)
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