Predicting community stability from species’ contribution to resistance, resilience and recovery

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Helmut Hillebrand
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems ; Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions ; Oceanography
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 450803873

Ecological stability is key to predict consequences of environmental change, as it encompasses response aspects such as the ability to withstand, absorb or recover from pulse and press disturbances as well as fluctuations. Major recent advances in the scientific assessment of ecological stability resulted from i) acknowledging the multidimensional nature of stability, ii) differentiating between the stability of emergent functional properties of the ecosystem and the stability of community composition, and iii) realizing the importance of spatial dynamics for understanding local stability properties. Despite these advances, the assessment of stability (and its use in ecology and environmental sciences) is still hampered by our inability to predict community stability from species-specific performances and species traits. Understanding species’ contributions to stability is the key objective of this proposal. We will refine and test metrics that capture species responses to changing environments and use these metrics to predict stability from single species performance and compare predicted to observed stability at the community level. The work is divided into four work packages, combining simulations & data analysis (WP 1) with three experimental work packages of increasing complexity (WP2-4). The meta-analysis in WP 1 uses recently developed stability decomposition methods to identify species contributing to stability and vulnerability across different types of ecosystems and organisms. For the experiments, marine plankton communities will be subjected to different trends and fluctuations in temperature. These experiments will start from a bottom-up approach combining species with known responses into species pairs and low diversity assemblages, comparing expected to observed stability (WP 2). In WP 3, we will test how the predictability of stability aspects such as resistance, resilience, recovery and temporal stability changes under different levels of connectivity using a metacommunity setup. Finally, we will use an indoor mesocosm facility to test whether the same traits affect phytoplankton community stability in the absence or presence of a generalist zooplankton consumer.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Privatdozentin Dr. Maren Striebel