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Opposing diversity-stability relationships within versus between aquatic producers and consumers.
Libin Zhou1, Qi Yang2, Pubin Hong2
1State Key Laboratory of Lake and Watershed Science for Water Security, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing 211135, China.
National Science Review
|June 22, 2026
Summary
Biodiversity boosts stability within trophic levels, but interactions between producer and consumer communities show negative diversity-stability relationships. This highlights the complex effects of biodiversity across food webs.
Area of Science:
- Ecology
- Food web dynamics
- Biodiversity research
Background:
- Biodiversity's role in temporal stability is known within single trophic levels.
- Understanding cross-trophic level impacts of biodiversity on stability is limited.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how diversity within and across producer (algae) and consumer (invertebrate) communities affects food web stability.
- To analyze the relationships between diversity and stability across adjacent trophic levels.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of time-series data from 97 aquatic food webs globally.
- Examined diversity-stability relationships within producer communities.
- Examined diversity-stability relationships within consumer communities.
- Examined diversity-stability relationships across producer and consumer trophic levels.
Main Results:
- Consumer diversity increased population asynchrony and stability, enhancing community stability.
- Producer diversity increased population asynchrony but decreased population stability, yielding no net effect.
- Negative diversity-stability relationships were observed across trophic levels: increased producer diversity decreased consumer stability, and increased consumer diversity decreased producer stability.
Conclusions:
- Interactions between trophic levels can invert the typically positive diversity-stability relationship.
- Altered producer dynamics and intensified top-down pressure may explain negative cross-trophic diversity-stability effects.
- Food web stability is influenced by complex interactions beyond single trophic levels.
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