Synchrony is broadly important to population and community dynamics due to its ubiquity and implications for extinction dynamics, system stability, and species diversity. Investigations of synchrony in community ecology have tended to focus on covariance in the abundances of multiple species in a single location. Yet, the importance of regional environmental variation and spatial processes in community dynamics suggests that community properties, such as species richness, could fluctuate synchronously across patches in a metacommunity, in an analog of population spatial synchrony. Here, we test the prevalence of this phenomenon and the conditions under which it may occur using theoretical simulations and empirical data from 20 marine and terrestrial metacommunities. Additionally, given the importance of biodiversity for stability of ecosystem function, we posit that spatial synchrony in species richness is strongly related to stability. Our findings show that metacommunities often exhibit spatial synchrony in species richness. We also found that richness synchrony can be driven by environmental stochasticity and dispersal, two mechanisms of population spatial synchrony. Richness synchrony also depended on community structure, including species evenness and beta diversity. Strikingly, ecosystem stability was more strongly related to richness synchrony than to species richness itself, likely because richness synchrony integrates information about community processes and environmental forcing. Our study highlights a new approach for studying spatiotemporal community dynamics and emphasizes the spatial dimensions of community dynamics and stability.

中文翻译：

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物种丰富度的空间同步性及其与生态系统稳定性的关系

同步性对种群和群落动态具有广泛的重要性，因为它无处不在，并且对灭绝动态、系统稳定性和物种多样性有影响。群落生态学中的同步性研究倾向于关注单个位置多个物种丰度的协方差。然而，区域环境变化和空间过程在群落动态中的重要性表明，群落特性，如物种丰富度，可以在一个元群落中的斑块之间同步波动，类似于种群空间同步。在这里，我们使用来自 20 个海洋和陆地元社区的理论模拟和经验数据来测试这种现象的普遍性以及它可能发生的条件。此外，鉴于生物多样性对生态系统功能稳定性的重要性，我们认为物种丰富度的空间同步与稳定性密切相关。我们的研究结果表明，元社区通常在物种丰富度方面表现出空间同步性。我们还发现，丰富度同步可以由环境随机性和分散性驱动，这是种群空间同步的两种机制。丰富度同步还取决于群落结构，包括物种均匀度和β多样性。引人注目的是，与物种丰富度本身相比，生态系统稳定性与丰富度同步性的相关性更强，这可能是因为丰富度同步性整合了有关群落过程和环境强迫的信息。