Species dynamics alter community diversity-biomass stability relationships

The relationship between community diversity and biomass variability remains a crucial ecological topic, with positive, negative and neutral diversitystability relationships reported from empirical studies. Theory highlights the relative importance of SpeciesSpecies or SpeciesEnvironment interactions in driving diversitystability patterns. Much previous work is based on an assumption of identical (stable) species-level dynamics. We studied ecosystem models incorporating stable, cyclic and more complex species-level dynamics, with either linear or non-linear density dependence, within a locally stable community framework. Species composition varies with increasing diversity, interacting with the correlation of species' environmental responses to drive either positive or negative diversitystability patterns, which theory based on communities with only stable species-level dynamics fails to predict. Including different dynamics points to new mechanisms that drive the full range of diversitybiomass stability relationships in empirical systems where a wider range of dynamical behaviours are important.