1,5,- 1China Agricultural University, College of resource & environment science, Ecology, China (mengb680@nenu.edu.cn)
- 2German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Puschstrasse 4, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
- 3Institute of Biology, Leipzig University, Puschstr. 4, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
- 4UFZ, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Department Physiological Diversity, Permoserstrasse 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany
- 5Graduate School of Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama National University, 79-7 Tokiwadai, Hodogaya, Yokohama, 240-8501 Japan
- 6Institute of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing, China
One of the unresolved questions in ecology is how the stabilizing effect of biodiversity develops through time and how it relates to ecosystem functioning. Recent studies have demonstrated that biodiversity's stabilizing effect on community production strengthens over time (Wagg et al. 2022). However, the underlying mechanisms, specifically, whether it aligns with that driving the strengthened niche complementarity and how they are shaped by climate change, remain poorly understood. This knowledge gap largely reflects limited understanding of how interspecific interactions contribute to the biodiversity–stability relationship.
By tracking a 20-year grassland biodiversity experiment and applying a split-plot design to remove legacy effects of biodiversity history, we disentangled the relative contributions of interspecific interactions and interaction-independent processes to biomass stability (Meng et al. 2025). Results support the idea that interspecific interactions become progressively less competition-dominated as communities develop (Reich et al. 2012). Accordingly, the destabilizing influence of these interactions on species-level variability declines over time, yet they contribute only marginally to the temporal strengthening of biodiversity’s effect on reducing community-level variability. Interspecific interactions remain dynamic, shifting with environmental conditions and through time—and can, in particular, enhance community stability during drier periods. Notably, while biodiversity’s stabilizing effect initially increased in concert with improvements in ecosystem functioning, this coupling weakened as interaction-based processes.
This study examines how the effects of biodiversity unfold over time, highlighting the role of interspecific interactions in linking biodiversity’s productivity-enhancing and stabilizing effects. Our findings reveal the dynamic nature of these effects and show that adopting a more comprehensive, time-explicit perspective on biodiversity is essential for predicting and managing the long-term transformations ecosystems face.
Meng, B., Luo, M., Loreau, M., Hong, P., Craven, D., Eisenhauer, N. et al. (2025). Stabilizing effects of biodiversity arise from species-specific dynamics rather than interspecific interactions in grasslands. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 9, 1837–1847
Reich, P.B., Tilman, D., Isbell, F., Mueller, K., Hobbie, S.E., Flynn, D.F.B. et al. (2012). Impacts of Biodiversity Loss Escalate Through Time as Redundancy Fades. Science, 336, 589-592.
Wagg, C., Roscher, C., Weigelt, A., Vogel, A., Ebeling, A., de Luca, E. et al. (2022). Biodiversity–stability relationships strengthen over time in a long-term grassland experiment. Nature Communications, 13, 7752.
How to cite: Meng, B., Huang, Y., Roscher, C., Sasaki, T., Wang, S., and Eisenhauer, N.: Decoupling of biodiversity effects on productivity and stability over time, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-201, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-201, 2026.
