Synchrony and tail-dependent synchrony have different effects on the stability of terrestrial and freshwater communities

Global change alters the stability of biological communities by affecting species richness and how species covary through time (i.e., synchrony). There are few large-scale empirical tests of stability-diversity-synchrony relationships and those mostly focus on the terrestrial realm. Moreover, the effect of synchrony is largely unknown when species only covary at either high or low extremes of abundance (i.e., tail-dependent synchrony), a common phenomenon in ecological communities. Here, we synthesized long-term community time-series data (20+ years of species’ abundances/biomass for 2,668 communities across 7 taxonomic groups) from both terrestrial and freshwater realms and explored how the relationships among richness, synchrony, and stability vary across realms. We also investigated the effect of tail-dependent synchrony on stability across 714 freshwater and 1,954 terrestrial communities. For terrestrial communities, we found a positive diversity-stability relationship and that the tail-dependent synchrony was a more important determinant of stability than the traditional measure of overall synchrony (i.e., based on the covariation of all species). For freshwater communities, only overall synchrony explained some variation in stability. Assessing tail-dependent synchrony can improve our ability to understand why stability varies across different ecosystems and thereby our inferences about the causes of human-mediated biodiversity loss.