Ecuadorian Plant-Hummingbird interactions over an elevation gradient in the Andes, sampled with camera traps in 11 localities

Community ecologists have made great advances in understanding how natural
communities can be both diverse and stable by studying communities as
interaction networks. However, focus has been on interaction networks
aggregated over time, neglecting the consequences of the seasonal
organization of interactions, henceforth seasonal structure, for community
stability. Here, we extended previous theoretical findings on the topic in
two ways: (i) by integrating empirical seasonal structure of 11
plant-hummingbird communities into dynamic models, and (ii) by tackling
multiple facets of network stability together. We show that, in a
competition context, seasonal structure enhances community stability by
allowing diverse and resilient communities while preserving their
robustness to species extinctions. The positive effects of empirical
seasonal structure on network stability vanished when using randomized
seasonal structures, suggesting that eco-evolutionary dynamics produce
stabilizing seasonal structures. We also show that the effects of seasonal
structure on community stability are mainly mediated by changes in network
structure and productivity, suggesting that the seasonal structure of a
community is an important and yet neglected aspect in the
diversity-stability and diversity-productivity debates.