Understanding the processes regulating temporal stability is important to infer species coexistence and ecosystem stability patterns. Here we aimed to advance our understanding on temporal stability on both population and community level by using functional traits as proxies for species strategies. We used a long-term biomass data (13 and 16 years for the population and community levels, respectively) from oligotrophic wet meadow community in a factorial experiment with fertilization and dominant removal. On site, we measured traits conferring different dimensions of functional trade-offs (leaf traits, plant height and seed mass, with additional information on rooting depth used at the population level). At the population level, we related temporal stability, measured as a coefficient of variation of species’ biomass over time, to plant traits. At the community level, one of the key factors of temporal stability is the degree of synchrony in species fluctuations. This can range from partial synchrony, through independent fluctuations of coexisting species to compensatory dynamics. These dynamics are conditioned by differences in constituent species and the set of functional traits they possess. We tested the relationship between temporal correlations of pairs of species and their mutual functional dissimilarity.
Results/Conclusions
At the population level, we demonstrated that higher values of leaf dry matter content were consistently associated with greater population temporal stability across all experimental conditions. This indicates that slow-growing species with more conservative economics respond less rapidly to environmental changes, and are thus generally more stable over time. This relationship provided empirical evidence linking trait trade-offs to different coexistence strategies of species in a fluctuating environment, namely to the different abilities of species’ populations to buffer against unfavorable conditions. At the community level, we found the prevalence of partial synchronization as a concordant response of species to fluctuating environments, with functionally similar species fluctuating more synchronously in all treatment combinations. Unlike the results on the population level, this relationship was based on the overall differences in species overall phenotype.