Long-term and year-to-year stability and its drivers in a Mediterranean grassland

Understanding the mechanisms underlying community stability has become an urgent need in order to protect ecosystems from global change and resulting biodiversity loss. While community stability can be influenced by richness, synchrony in annual fluctuations of species, species stability and functional traits, the relative contributions of these drivers to stability are still unclear. In semi-natural grasslands, land-use changes such as fertilization might affect stability by decreasing richness and influencing year-to-year fluctuations. In addition, they can promote long-term directional trends, shifting community composition and influencing grassland maintenance. Thus, it is important to consider how species and community stability vary year-to-year but also in the long term.
Using a 14-year vegetation time series of a species-rich semi-natural Mediterranean grassland, we studied the relative importance of richness, synchrony, species stability and functional traits on community stab...