Journal
ECOLOGY
Volume 98, Issue 4, Pages 971-981Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/ecy.1757
Keywords
compensatory dynamics; demographic stochasticity; environmental stochasticity; grassland; interspecific competition; stability; synchrony
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation through a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology to ATT [DBI-1400370]
- CAREER Award [DEB-1054040]
- TULIP Laboratory of Excellence [ANR-10-LABX-41]
- BIOSTASES Advanced Grant
- European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon research and innovation programme [666971]
- Div Of Biological Infrastructure
- Direct For Biological Sciences [1400370] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Temporal asynchrony among species helps diversity to stabilize ecosystem functioning, but identifying the mechanisms that determine synchrony remains a challenge. Here, we refine and test theory showing that synchrony depends on three factors: species responses to environmental variation, interspecific interactions, and demographic stochasticity. We then conduct simulation experiments with empirical population models to quantify the relative influence of these factors on the synchrony of dominant species in five semiarid grasslands. We found that the average synchrony of per capita growth rates, which can range from 0 (perfect asynchrony) to 1 (perfect synchrony), was higher when environmental variation was present (0.62) rather than absent (0.43). Removing interspecific interactions and demographic stochasticity had small effects on synchrony. For the dominant species in these plant communities, where species interactions and demographic stochasticity have little influence, synchrony reflects the covariance in species' responses to the environment.
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