Identifying the factors that destabilize communities is critical for predicting and mitigating the ecological impacts of environmental change. Although theory has shown that local ecosystem size and regional dispersal can determine biodiversity, less is known about the direct and indirect effects of these factors on community stability. Here we show that multitrophic community instability of invertebrates and fishes in coastal ponds is negatively related to local pond size and positively related to distance to the ocean, a proxy for dispersal limitation. Importantly, the effects of pond size and distance on instability were direct rather than indirectly mediated by species richness. This suggests that the diversity-stability relationship is an epiphenomenon whose resolution is neither necessary nor sufficient to understand the stability of these multitrophic communities. Instead, well-established and easily-measured local and regional factors historically linked to species richness can be used to predict multitrophic community stability in a variable world.

中文翻译：

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预测可变世界中多营养群落的稳定性

确定破坏社区稳定的因素对于预测和减轻环境变化的生态影响至关重要。尽管理论表明当地生态系统的规模和区域分布可以决定生物多样性，但人们对这些因素对群落稳定性的直接和间接影响知之甚少。在这里，我们表明沿海池塘中无脊椎动物和鱼类的多营养群落不稳定性与当地池塘大小呈负相关，与与海洋的距离呈正相关，这是扩散限制的代表。重要的是，池塘大小和距离对不稳定性的影响是由物种丰富度直接而不是间接介导的。这表明多样性-稳定性关系是一种附带现象，其分辨率对于理解这些多营养群落的稳定性既不必要也不充分。取而代之的是，历史上与物种丰富度相关的既定且易于测量的地方和区域因素可用于预测可变世界中的多营养群落稳定性。