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 eno..., , , # Title of Dataset: Why are plant communities stable? Disentangling the role of dominance, asynchrony and averaging effect following realistic species loss scenario

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The dataset contains two lists.

The first list contains compositional data for individual species across all 30 plots for all the years of the study (2016-2022). Each column (3-32) contains data for all plots numbered from 1 to 30. Zeroes refer to species missing from communities, so their biomass value is a true zero. The values are in g/0.25m2. The data were used for the calculation of plot-level biomass, its temporal coefficient of variation, species richness, relative abundance of individual species, and as an entry for comstab R package (Segrestin, J., Götzenberger, L., Valencia, E., de Bello, F., & Lepš, J. (2024). A unified framework for partitioning the drivers of stability of ecological communities. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 33(5), e13828. [https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13828](https://doi.org/10.1111...