DOI: 10.5061/dryad.rxwdbrvj8
title: Data from: Why are plant communities stable? Disentangling the role of dominance, asynchrony and averaging effect following realistic species loss scenario

description: A growing number of studies have demonstrated that biodiversity is a
 strong and positive predictor of ecosystem temporal stability by
 simultaneously affecting multiple underlying mechanisms of stability i.e.
 dominance, asynchrony, and averaging effects. However, to date, no study
 has disentangled the relative role of these key mechanisms of stability in
 biodiversity experiments. We created a species richness gradient
 by mimicking a loss of rare species and assessed the role of species
 richness on community stability and, more importantly, quantified the
 relative role of three stabilizing mechanisms i.e. dominance
 (stabilization due to stable dominants compared to the rest of the species
 in the community), asynchrony (stabilization due to temporal asynchrony
 between species), and averaging effects (pure effect of diversity) on
 community stability across a species richness gradient. We found
 that extreme species loss negatively impacted community stability, but
 just three species were enough to stabilize biomass production to a level
 similar to highly diverse communities. However, the similar stability of
 communities resulted from differing contributions from each stability
 mechanism, depending on the community diversity. Since less abundant
 species were more temporally variable, species loss stabilized the
 populations of the remaining species. The loss of rare and subordinate
 species reduced the dominance and averaging effects, but increased the
 asynchrony effect. Hence, the asynchrony effect played a major role in the
 stability of species poor communities, while the averaging effect drove
 most of the stability of species rich communities. Overall, dominance
 played only a minor role, accounting for 5-15% of the stabilization, while
 asynchrony and averaging effects were dominating forces contributing to ~
 85-95% of the total stabilization. Synthesis. This study highlights the
 importance of biodiversity and roles of dominant and rare species for
 long-term community stability and, for the first time, disentangles
 relative roles of dominance effect, asynchrony, and averaging effect on
 community stability in a real-world biodiversity experiment.
description: # Title of Dataset: Why are plant communities stable? Disentangling the
 role of dominance, asynchrony and averaging effect following realistic
 species loss scenario --- The dataset contains two lists. The first list
 contains compositional data for individual species across all 30 plots for
 all the years of the study (2016-2022). Each column (3-32) contains data
 for all plots numbered from 1 to 30. Zeroes refer to species missing from
 communities, so their biomass value is a true zero. The values are in
 g/0.25m2. The data were used for the calculation of plot-level biomass,
 its temporal coefficient of variation, species richness, relative
 abundance of individual species, and as an entry for comstab R package
 (Segrestin, J., Götzenberger, L., Valencia, E., de Bello, F., & Lepš,
 J. (2024). A unified framework for partitioning the drivers of stability
 of ecological communities. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 33(5), e13828.
 [https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13828](https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13828)),
 which was used to compute the relative roles of three stabilizing
 mechanisms i.e. dominance (stabilization due to stable dominants compared
 to the rest of the species in the community), asynchrony (stabilization
 due to temporal asynchrony between species), and averaging effects (pure
 effect of diversity) on community stability across a species richness
 gradient. The second list contains data about biomass removed from
 individual plots (except controls) by manual removal. The values are in
 g/m2. ## Description of the Data and file structure Details about data
 structure and meaning of individual columns are more described using notes
 in the .xlsx file