Data from: Why are plant communities stable? Disentangling the role of dominance, asynchrony and averaging effect following realistic species loss scenario

A growing number of studies have demonstrated that biodiversity is a
strong and positive predictor of ecosystem temporal stability by
simultaneously affecting multiple underlying mechanisms of stability i.e.
dominance, asynchrony, and averaging effects. However, to date, no study
has disentangled the relative role of these key mechanisms of stability in
biodiversity experiments. We created a species richness gradient
by mimicking a loss of rare species and assessed the role of species
richness on community stability and, more importantly, quantified the
relative role of three stabilizing mechanisms i.e. dominance
(stabilization due to stable dominants compared to the rest of the species
in the community), asynchrony (stabilization due to temporal asynchrony
between species), and averaging effects (pure effect of diversity) on
community stability across a species richness gradient. We found
that extreme species loss negatively impacted community stability, but
just three species were enough to stabilize biomass production to a level
similar to highly diverse communities. However, the similar stability of
communities resulted from differing contributions from each stability
mechanism, depending on the community diversity. Since less abundant
species were more temporally variable, species loss stabilized the
populations of the remaining species. The loss of rare and subordinate
species reduced the dominance and averaging effects, but increased the
asynchrony effect. Hence, the asynchrony effect played a major role in the
stability of species poor communities, while the averaging effect drove
most of the stability of species rich communities. Overall, dominance
played only a minor role, accounting for 5-15% of the stabilization, while
asynchrony and averaging effects were dominating forces contributing to ~
85-95% of the total stabilization. Synthesis. This study highlights the
importance of biodiversity and roles of dominant and rare species for
long-term community stability and, for the first time, disentangles
relative roles of dominance effect, asynchrony, and averaging effect on
community stability in a real-world biodiversity experiment.