Latitudinal patterns of forest ecosystem stability across spatial scales as affected by biodiversity and environmental heterogeneity |
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| Authors: | Xuetao Qiao Thomas Lamy Shaopeng Wang Yann Hautier Yan Geng Hannah J White Naili Zhang Zhonghui Zhang Chunyu Zhang Xiuhai Zhao Klaus von Gadow |
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| Institution: | 1. Research Center of Forest Management Engineering of State Forestry and Grassland Administration, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China;2. MARBEC, University of Montpellier, CNRS, Ifremer, IRD, Montpellier, France;3. Institute of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing, China;4. Ecology and Biodiversity Group, Department of Biology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands;5. School of Life Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK;6. The Key Laboratory for Silviculture and Conservation of Ministry of Education, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China;7. Jilin Provincial Academy of Forestry Sciences, Changchun, China |
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| Abstract: | Our planet is facing a variety of serious threats from climate change that are unfolding unevenly across the globe. Uncovering the spatial patterns of ecosystem stability is important for predicting the responses of ecological processes and biodiversity patterns to climate change. However, the understanding of the latitudinal pattern of ecosystem stability across scales and of the underlying ecological drivers is still very limited. Accordingly, this study examines the latitudinal patterns of ecosystem stability at the local and regional spatial scale using a natural assembly of forest metacommunities that are distributed over a large temperate forest region, considering a range of potential environmental drivers. We found that the stability of regional communities (regional stability) and asynchronous dynamics among local communities (spatial asynchrony) both decreased with increasing latitude, whereas the stability of local communities (local stability) did not. We tested a series of hypotheses that potentially drive the spatial patterns of ecosystem stability, and found that although the ecological drivers of biodiversity, climatic history, resource conditions, climatic stability, and environmental heterogeneity varied with latitude, latitudinal patterns of ecosystem stability at multiple scales were affected by biodiversity and environmental heterogeneity. In particular, α diversity is positively associated with local stability, while β diversity is positively associated with spatial asynchrony, although both relationships are weak. Our study provides the first evidence that latitudinal patterns of the temporal stability of naturally assembled forest metacommunities across scales are driven by biodiversity and environmental heterogeneity. Our findings suggest that the preservation of plant biodiversity within and between forest communities and the maintenance of heterogeneous landscapes can be crucial to buffer forest ecosystems at higher latitudes from the faster and more intense negative impacts of climate change in the future. |
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| Keywords: | climatic history climatic stability forest productivity latitude resource conditions spatial asynchrony spatial scales temporal stability |
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