Towards a better ecological understanding of metacommunity stability: A multiscale framework to disentangle population variability and synchrony effects

1. Despite great progress in our understanding of the mechanisms governing ecosystem stability in local communities, we still lack knowledge at a larger spatial scale. Studying the stability of metacommunities requires assessing the temporal stability and synchrony of populations across space and organizational levels. Previous attempts to disentangle these effects have provided limited ecological interpretations, and conceptual improvements are needed to identify the underlying ecological processes.
2. We propose an extended framework aiming at disentangling simultaneously the relative effects of population stability and different types of synchronies on metacommunity stability. We adapted previous methods of decomposing stability into a new set of indices associated with clearer ecological hypotheses. Particularly, we provide synchrony indices that are not affected by statistical properties of the metacommunity but focus on species responses to environment, demography, and interaction...