Predicting the stability of multitrophic communities in a variable world

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.