Warming modulates the effect of consumers on ecosystem stability; Data and script

Climate warming is impacting stability across diverse ecosystems but our understanding of the involved mechanisms, specifically the possibility of interactive effects with other stability drivers, is still limited. By conducting a 5-year-long field experiment investigating if warming and rodent herbivores jointly influence salt marsh functional and compositional stability, we show that both herbivory and warming individually decreases functional stability. While herbivory decreases ecosystem stability by affecting the stability of the dominant species, warming alters it by shifting stability control mechanism from species dominance to species asynchrony, thus causing a synergistic interaction with herbivory and breaking the otherwise positive relationship between functional and compositional stability. Our findings highlight that warming can shift the importance of stabilizing mechanisms, decoupling ecosystem stability from other biological drivers and increasing its dimensionality. Understanding how drivers of global change may interact is critical to anticipating change and managing natural ecosystems in an increasingly anthropogenic world.