Selected Publications

Losses and gains in species diversity affect ecological stability1–7 and the sustainability of ecosystem functions and services8–13. Experiments and models have revealed positive, negative and no effects of diversity on individual components of stability, such as temporal variability, resistance and resilience2,3,6,11,12,14. How these stability components covary remains poorly understood15. Similarly, the effects of diversity on overall ecosystem stability16, which is conceptually akin to ecosystem multifunctionality17,18, remain unknown. Here we studied communities of aquatic ciliates to understand how temporal variability, resistance and overall ecosystem stability responded to diversity (that is, species richness) in a large experiment involving 690 micro-ecosystems sampled 19 times over 40 days, resulting in 12,939 samplings. Species richness increased temporal stability but decreased resistance to warming. Thus, two stability components covaried negatively along the diversity gradient. Previous biodiversity manipulation studies rarely reported such negative covariation despite general predictions of the negative effects of diversity on individual stability components3. Integrating our findings with the ecosystem multifunctionality concept revealed hump- and U-shaped effects of diversity on overall ecosystem stability. That is, biodiversity can increase overall ecosystem stability when biodiversity is low, and decrease it when biodiversity is high, or the opposite with a U-shaped relationship. The effects of diversity on ecosystem multifunctionality would also be hump- or U-shaped if diversity had positive effects on some functions and negative effects on others. Linking the ecosystem multifunctionality concept and ecosystem stability can transform the perceived effects of diversity on ecological stability and may help to translate this science into policy-relevant information.
Nature, (563), 7729, pp. 109–112, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0627-8, 2018

Recent Publications

More Publications

. A multidimensional approach to the expression of phenotypic plasticity. Functional Ecology, 2020.

. Species multidimensional effects explain idiosyncratic responses of communities to environmental change. Nature Ecology & Evolution, (4), 8, pp. 1036–1043, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1206-6, 2020.

. Testing multiple drivers of the temperature-size rule with nonlinear temperature increase. Functional Ecology, 2020.

. The interplay between movement, morphology and dispersal in Tetrahymena ciliates. PeerJ, (7), pp. e8197, https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.8197, 2019.

. The intrinsic predictability of ecological time series and its potential to guide forecasting. Ecological Monographs, (89), 2, pp. e01359, https://doi.org/10.1002/ecm.1359, 2019.

. Warming can destabilize predator–prey interactions by shifting the functional response from Type III to Type II. Journal of Animal Ecology, (88), 10, pp. 1575–1586, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13053, 2019.

Recent & Upcoming Talks

More Talks

From high-throughput community ecology to ecological predictability
Nov 20, 2018 11:15
Warming decreases stability and productivity via changing species interactions
Aug 10, 2017 14:50
How to make ecology more predictive?
Feb 18, 2016 13:00
Inter- and intra-individual variation matter for predicting dispersal of Tetrahymena ciliates
Aug 31, 2015 17:45

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