A fundamental property of an ecological community is its stability. Questions such as why some, but not other, communities return to their steady state conditions more quickly after perturbations, show stronger resistance or robustness, and/or fluctuate less in their dynamics have fascinated ecologists for decades. While a host of abiotic and biotic factors have the potential to influence ecological stability, much of the existing research on ecological stability has focused on its relationships with species diversity. Within this context, earlier studies have mostly investigated diversity-stability relationships via conceptual and mathematical models, and it was until 1990s when ecologists began to use theoretical and experimental approaches to systematically explore the consequences of changes in biodiversity for ecological stability, in an effort to understand the significance of rapid, global biodiversity loss for ecosystem functioning. The diversity-stability research in the past two decades has yielded fruitful results, leading to the identification of both general patterns (e.g. positive relationships between diversity and community-level temporal stability) and underlying mechanisms (e.g., increased asynchrony in more diverse communities). More recent research has expanded to consider multiple dimensions of biodiversity as well as multiple dimensions of stability, and to explore diversity-stability relationships across temporal and spatial scales. Building on this existing research, we propose to organize an oral session at the 2020 ESA Annual Conference, to rally active players with broad backgrounds in the field to discuss the next step of stability research. Presentations in this session will explore various mechanisms, including but not limited to those related to biodiversity, that regulate ecological stability. This theme is motivated by the fact that multiple abiotic (e.g., climate, resource/nutrient availability) and biotic (e.g., food web structure, interaction type and strength) factors may simultaneously influence ecological stability, and that ongoing climate and environmental changes may alter the stability of natural communities both directly as well as indirectly through changing the diversity and other characteristics of the impacted communities. Topics to be discussed include 1) community and food web characteristics that stabilize communities, 2) the role of species dispersal and spatial processes in regulating community stability, 3) the importance of the stabilizing role of species diversity relative to other factors, and 4) linking environmental change drivers to diversity-stability research. This session provides a platform for researchers at the frontier of stability research, together with the audience, to discuss topical ideas and future directions in an exciting field of community ecology.