Effects of multiple stressors on the dimensionality of ecological stability

Resistance and Resilience of Species Composition: Thirty Years of Experimental Mismanagement and Subsequent Restoration in a Species Rich Meadow

Traditionally managed grasslands are among the most species-rich communities, which are threatened by land use changes-management intensification or abandonment. The resistance of their species composition to mismanagement and ability to recover after re-establishment of traditional management is of prime conservational interest. In a manipulative experiment in a wet meadow, we simulated mismanagement by a factorial combination of abandonment of mowing and fertilization. The dominant species Molinia caerulea was removed in half of the plots to assess its role in community dynamics. The 21 years' mismanagement period was followed by the re-establishment of the traditional management. The plots were sampled yearly from 1994 (the baseline data, before the introduction of the experimental treatments), until 2023. Estimates of cover of all vascular plant species provided the species richness and effective number of species. For each year, the chord distances to baseline species composition and to corresponding control plot were calculated. The compositional data were analyzed by constrained ordination methods, and the univariate characteristics by Repeated Measures ANOVA. All the plots, including those with traditional management throughout the whole experiment, underwent directional changes, probably caused by a decrease in groundwater level due to global warming. Both fertilization and abandonment led to a loss of competitively weak, usually low-statured species, due to increased asymmetric competition for light. The effect of fertilization was faster and stronger than that of abandonment demonstrating weaker resistance to fertilization. The removal of dominant species partially mitigated negative effects only in unmown, non-fertilized plots. The recovery following mismanagement cessation was faster (signifying higher resilience) in unmown than in fertilized plots, where it was slowed by a legacy of fertilization. In a changing world, two reference plot types are recommended for assessment of resistance and resilience, one original state and one reflecting compositional changes independent of treatments.

The spatiotemporal stability of plant diversity is disconnected from biomass stability in response to human activities in a South American temperate grassland

Human activities alter biomass, nutrient availability, and species dominance in grasslands, impacting their richness, composition, and biomass production. Stability (invariability in time or space) can inform the predictability of plant communities in response to human activities. However, this measure has been simplistically analyzed for temporal (interannual) changes in live biomass, disregarding their spatial stability and the temporal stability of other plant community attributes. Moreover, the simultaneous analysis of temporal and spatial stabilities of plant communities has been scarcely assessed. Here, we test how biomass removal and nutrient addition simultaneously modify the temporal and spatial stabilities of plant richness (α diversity), composition dissimilarity (β diversity), aboveground live biomass, and the role of plant species dominance in the stability responses. We conducted a factorial experiment of biomass removal (grazing, mowing, or intact -no removal-) and nutrient addition (unfertilized or fertilized with nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) in a temperate grassland of Argentina, South America. We replicated the experiment in 6 blocks over 10 years to estimate the temporal and spatial stabilities of the plant community. The spatiotemporal stability of plant richness and composition dissimilarity decreased in the intact grassland, while the temporal stability of live biomass increased, compared to the grazed and mowed grasslands. Nutrient addition reduced the spatiotemporal stability of live biomass and the spatial stability of plant richness. The stabilities of species richness as well as that of composition dissimilarity were negatively associated with plant dominance, while the live biomass stability was not. Our results suggest that simplifying the effect of biomass removal and nutrient addition on grassland stability is not feasible, as plant diversity stability responses are not surrogates for biomass stability. The contrasting spatiotemporal stability responses of plant diversity and biomass represent a step forward in predicting human activities' impact over time and across space in temperate grasslands.

Accounting for effects of growth rate when measuring ecological stability in response to pulse perturbations

Ecological stability is a vital component of natural ecosystems that can inform effective conservation and ecosystem management. Furthermore, there is increasing interest in making comparisons of stability values across sites, systems and taxonomic groups, often using comparative synthetic approaches, such as meta-analysis. However, these synthetic approaches often compare/contrast systems where measures of stability mean very different things to the taxa involved. Here, we present results from theoretical models and empirical data to illustrate how differences in growth rates among taxa influence four widely used metrics of ecological stability of species abundances responding to pulse perturbations: resilience, recovery, resistance and temporal stability. We refer to these classic growth-rate-dependent metrics as 'realised' stability. We show that realised resilience and realised temporal stability vary as a function of organisms' growth rates; realised recovery depends on the relation between growth rate and sampling duration; and realised resistance depends on the relation between growth rate and sampling interval. To account for these influences, we introduce metrics intended to be more independent of growth rates, which we refer to as 'intrinsic' stability. Intrinsic stability can be used to summarise the overall effects of a disturbance, separately from internal recovery processes - thereby allowing more general comparisons of disturbances across organisms and contexts. We argue that joint consideration of both realised and intrinsic stability is important for future comparative studies.

Combined effects of heat waves and pesticide pollution on zooplankton communities: Does the timing of stressor matter?

Most studies assessing the combined effects of chemical and non-chemical stressors on aquatic ecosystems have been based on synchronous stressor applications. However, asynchronous exposure scenarios may be more common in nature, particularly for pulsed stressors such as heatwaves and pesticide concentration peaks. In this study, we investigated the single and combined effects of the insecticide chlorpyrifos (CPF) and a heatwave (HW) on a zooplankton community representative of a Mediterranean coastal wetland using synchronous (CPF+HW) and asynchronous (HW→CPF and CPF→HW) exposure scenarios. CPF was applied at a concentration of 0.8 µg/L (single pulse), and the HW was simulated by a temperature increase of 8°C above the control temperature (20°C) for 7 days in freshwater microcosms. The interaction between stressors in synchrony resulted in synergistic effects at the population level (Daphnia magna) and additive at the community level. The partial reduction of sensitive species resulted in an abundance increase of competing species that were more tolerant to the evaluated stressors (e.g. Moina sp.). The asynchronous exposure scenarios resulted in a similar abundance decline of sensitive populations as compared to the synchronous one; however, the timing of stressor resulted in different responses in the long term. In the HW→CPF treatment, the D. magna population recovered at least one month faster than in the CPF+HW treatment, probably due to survival selection and cross-tolerance mechanisms. In the CPF→HW treatment, the effects lasted longer than in the CPF+HW, and the population did not recover within the experimental period, most likely due to the energetic costs of detoxification and effects on internal damage recovery. The different timing and magnitude of indirect effects among the tested asynchronous scenarios resulted in more severe effects on the structure of the zooplankton community in the CPF→HW treatment. Our study highlights the relevance of considering the order of stressors to predict the long-term effects of chemicals and heatwaves both at the population and community levels.

Quality matters: Response of bacteria and ciliates to different allochthonous dissolved organic matter sources as a pulsed disturbance in shallow lakes

Shallow lake ecosystems are particularly prone to disturbances such as pulsed dissolved organic matter (allochthonous-DOM; hereafter allo-DOM) loadings from catchments. However, the effects of allo-DOM with contrasting quality (in addition to quantity) on the planktonic communities of microbial loop are poorly understood. To determine the impact of different qualities of pulsed allo-DOM disturbance on the coupling between bacteria and ciliates, we conducted a mesocosm experiment with two different allo-DOM sources added to mesocosms in a single-pulse disturbance event: Alder tree leaf extract, a more labile (L) source and HuminFeed® (HF), a more recalcitrant source. Allo-DOM sources were used as separate treatments and in combination (HFL) relative to the control without allo-DOM additions (C). Our results indicate that the quality of allo-DOM was a major regulator of planktonic microbial community biomass and/or composition through which both bottom-up and top-down forces were involved. Bacteria biomass showed significant nonlinear responses in L and HFL with initial increases followed by decreases to pre-pulse conditions. Ciliate biomass was significantly higher in L compared to all other treatments. In terms of composition, bacterivore ciliate abundance was significantly higher in both L and HFL treatments, mainly driven by the bacterial biomass increase in the same treatments. GAMM models showed negative interaction between metazoan zooplankton biomass and ciliates, but only in the L treatment, indicating top-down control on ciliates. Ecosystem stability analyses revealed overperformance, high resilience and full recovery of bacteria in the HFL and L treatments, while ciliates showed significant shift in compositional stability in HFL and L with incomplete taxonomic recovery. Our study highlights the importance of allo-DOM quality shaping the response within the microbial loop not only through triggering different scenarios in biomass, but also the community composition, stability, and species interactions (top-down and bottom-up) in bacteria and plankton.

Multidimensional responses of grassland stability to eutrophication

Eutrophication usually impacts grassland biodiversity, community composition, and biomass production, but its impact on the stability of these community aspects is unclear. One challenge is that stability has many facets that can be tightly correlated (low dimensionality) or highly disparate (high dimensionality). Using standardized experiments in 55 grassland sites from a globally distributed experiment (NutNet), we quantify the effects of nutrient addition on five facets of stability (temporal invariability, resistance during dry and wet growing seasons, recovery after dry and wet growing seasons), measured on three community aspects (aboveground biomass, community composition, and species richness). Nutrient addition reduces the temporal invariability and resistance of species richness and community composition during dry and wet growing seasons, but does not affect those of biomass. Different stability measures are largely uncorrelated under both ambient and eutrophic conditions, indicating consistently high dimensionality. Harnessing the dimensionality of ecological stability provides insights for predicting grassland responses to global environmental change.

Destabilizing Effects of Environmental Stressors on Aquatic Communities and Interaction Networks across a Major River Basin

Human-driven environmental stressors are increasingly threatening species survival and diversity of river systems worldwide. However, it remains unclear how the stressors affect the stability changes across aquatic multiple communities. Here, we used environmental DNA (eDNA) data sets from a human-dominated river in China over 3 years and analyzed the stability changes in multiple communities under persistent anthropogenic stressors, including land use and pollutants. First, we found that persistent stressors significantly reduced multifaceted species diversity (e.g., species richness, Shannon's diversity, and Simpson's diversity) and species stability but increased species synchrony across multiple communities. Second, the structures of interaction networks inferred from an empirical meta-food web were significantly changed under persistent stressors, for example, resulting in decreased network modularity and negative/positive cohesion. Third, piecewise structural equation modeling proved that the persistent stress-induced decline in the stability of multiple communities mainly depended upon diversity-mediated pathways rather than the direct effects of stress per se; specifically, the increase of species synchrony and the decline of interaction network modularity were the main biotic drivers of stability variation. Overall, our study highlights the destabilizing effects of persistent stressors on multiple communities as well as the mechanistic dependencies, mainly through reducing species diversity, increasing species synchrony, and changing interaction networks.

Impacts of extreme climatic events on trophic network complexity and multidimensional stability

Untangling the relationship between network complexity and ecological stability under climate change is an arduous challenge for theoretical and empirical ecology. Even more so, when considering extreme climatic events. Here, we studied the effects of extreme climatic events (heatwaves) on the complexity of realistic freshwater ecosystems using topological and quantitative trophic network metrics. Next, we linked changes in network complexity with the investigation of four stability components (temporal stability, resistance, resilience, and recovery) of community's functional, compositional, and energy flux stability. We found reduction in topological network complexity to be correlated with reduction of functional and compositional resistance. However, temperature-driven increase in link-weighted network complexity increased functional and energy flux recovery and resilience, but at the cost of increased compositional instability. Overall, we propose an overarching approach to elucidate the effects of climate change on multidimensional stability through the lens of network complexity, providing helpful insights for preserving ecosystems stability under climate change.

Acute Toxicity of Daphnia magna Neonates Exposed to Single and Composite Mixtures of Four Emerging Contaminants

The effects of emerging contaminants on environmental health are of high concern, especially those potentially induced by mixtures. We assessed single and composite mixtures of triclosan (T), 17β-estradiol (E2), sulfamethoxazole (SMX), and nicotine (N) at various concentrations, on neonates of Daphnia magna. When used in single exposure, T and N induced high toxicity (100% immobility, each one), compared to SMX and E2 (2.5% and 10% immobility, respectively). When T, E2, SMX and N were in mixture, T had the highest contribution to the overall toxicity in mixture exposures. The N toxicity lowered when in a fourfold exposure (85% immobility in fourfold exposure). Due to the high toxicity of T and N, both alone and in the mixtures, our results can serve as a warning about the use of these substances and their release in the aquatic ecosystem.

Multiple anthropogenic pressures eliminate the effects of soil microbial diversity on ecosystem functions in experimental microcosms

Biodiversity is crucial for the provision of ecosystem functions. However, ecosystems are now exposed to a rapidly growing number of anthropogenic pressures, and it remains unknown whether biodiversity can still promote ecosystem functions under multifaceted pressures. Here we investigated the effects of soil microbial diversity on soil functions and properties when faced with an increasing number of simultaneous global change factors in experimental microcosms. Higher soil microbial diversity had a positive effect on soil functions and properties when no or few (i.e., 1–4) global change factors were applied, but this positive effect was eliminated by the co-occurrence of numerous global change factors. This was attributable to the reduction of soil fungal abundance and the relative abundance of an ecological cluster of coexisting soil bacterial and fungal taxa. Our study indicates that reducing the number of anthropogenic pressures should be a goal in ecosystem management, in addition to biodiversity conservation.

It is unclear whether the positive effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning are maintained under multifaceted anthropogenic disturbance. In this experiment, the authors show that multiple simultaneous stressors can negate the positive effect of microbial diversity on soil functions.

Increasing connections among temporal invariability, resistance and resilience of alpine grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau

Ecological stability contains multiple components, such as temporal invariability, resistance and resilience. Understanding the response of stability components to perturbations is beneficial for optimizing the management of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Although previous studies have investigated the effects of multiple perturbations on each stability component, few studies simultaneously measure the multiple stability components and their relationships. Alpine grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau are exposed to co-occurring perturbations, including climate change and human activities. Here, we quantified three stability components (temporal invariability, resistance, and resilience) of alpine grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau during periods of high (2000-2008) and low (2009-2017) human activity intensity, respectively. We focused on the effects of climate variables (temperature, precipitation, radiation) and human activities (grazing intensity) on covariation among stability components. The results show that (1) for periods of high and low human activity, temporal invariability was positively correlated with resistance and resilience, while resistance was independent of resilience; (2) the dimensionality of alpine grasslands decreased by almost 10%, from 0.61 in the first period to 0.55 in the second period, suggesting the increasing connections among temporal invariability, resistance and resilience of alpine grasslands; and (3) temperature but not grazing intensity dominated the changes in the dimensionality of stability. These findings improve our understanding of multi-dimensional stability and highlight the importance of climate variability on alpine grassland stability on the Tibetan Plateau.

Environmental factors indirectly reduce phytoplankton community stability via functional diversity

The biodiversity-stability relationship is a fundamental subject of ecological research. Considerable evidence demonstrates that biodiversity can either increase or decrease stability. Most relevant research mainly focuses on grassland and forest ecosystems. The biodiversity-stability relationship in aquatic ecosystems and the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. To fill the gap, we conducted a year-long study on the phytoplankton of reservoir ecosystems in the Xiangxi Bay of Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR) to test the following hypotheses: (H1) phytoplankton species richness and functional diversity directly reduce phytoplankton community stability in reservoir ecosystems; (H2) nutrient enrichment and water temperature increasing directly reduce phytoplankton community stability; and (H3) nutrients and water temperature indirectly reduce phytoplankton community stability via biodiversity. The structural equation model (SEM) found that functional diversity (community-weighted means of traits and functional divergence) had significant negative correlations with phytoplankton community stability (p < 0.05), while the species diversity had no significant correlation with phytoplankton community stability (p > 0.05). This finding partially supported the hypothesis H1, which suggested that the functional diversity had a closer tie with stability than the species diversity. SEM did not find any direct effect of environmental factors on phytoplankton community stability, which rejected our hypothesis H2. Instead, SEM found that water temperature and phosphate decreased phytoplankton community stability by increasing the first principal component of the community-weighted means of traits (CWM_PC1), which supported hypothesis H3. Further analysis showed that the increased water temperature and phosphate concentration can promote “r-strategists” species (larger CWM_PC1), which are less resistant to environmental disturbances, therefore decreasing the phytoplankton community stability. Our study highlights the importance of functional diversity in maintaining the relationship between biodiversity and stability in the phytoplankton community, which may provide a mechanistic understanding of the biodiversity-stability relationships in aquatic ecosystems.

Food web rewiring drives long-term compositional differences and late-disturbance interactions at the community level

Multiple anthropogenic disturbances affect the structure and functioning of communities. Recent evidence highlighted that, after pulse disturbance, the functioning a community performs may be recovered fast due to functional redundancy, whereas community multivariate composition needs a longer time. Yet, the mechanisms that drive the different community recovery times have not been quantified empirically. We use quantitative food-web analysis to assess the influence of species interactions on community recovery. We found species-interactions strength to be the main mechanism driving differences between structural and functional recovery. Additionally, we show that interactions between multiple disturbances appear in the long term only when both species-interaction strength and food-web architecture change significantly.

Ecological communities are constantly exposed to multiple natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Multivariate composition (if recovered) has been found to need significantly more time to be regained after pulsed disturbance compared to univariate diversity metrics and functional endpoints. However, the mechanisms driving the different recovery times of communities to single and multiple disturbances remain unexplored. Here, we apply quantitative ecological network analyses to try to elucidate the mechanisms driving long-term community-composition dissimilarity and late-stage disturbance interactions at the community level. For this, we evaluate the effects of two pesticides, nutrient enrichment, and their interactions in outdoor mesocosms containing a complex freshwater community. We found changes in interactions strength to be strongly related to compositional changes and identified postdisturbance interaction-strength rewiring to be responsible for most of the observed compositional changes. Additionally, we found pesticide interactions to be significant in the long term only when both interaction strength and food-web architecture are reshaped by the disturbances. We suggest that quantitative network analysis has the potential to unveil ecological processes that prevent long-term community recovery.

Establishing ecologically-relevant nutrient thresholds: A tool-kit with guidance on its use

One key component of any eutrophication management strategy is establishment of realistic thresholds above which negative impacts become significant and provision of ecosystem services is threatened. This paper introduces a toolkit of statistical approaches with which such thresholds can be set, explaining their rationale and situations under which each is effective. All methods assume a causal relationship between nutrients and biota, but we also recognise that nutrients rarely act in isolation. Many of the simpler methods have limited applicability when other stressors are present. Where relationships between nutrients and biota are strong, regression is recommended. Regression relationships can be extended to include additional stressors or variables responsible for variation between water bodies. However, when the relationship between nutrients and biota is weaker, categorical approaches are recommended. Of these, binomial regression and an approach based on classification mismatch are most effective although both will underestimate threshold concentrations if a second stressor is present. Whilst approaches such as changepoint analysis are not particularly useful for meeting the specific needs of EU legislation, other multivariate approaches (e.g. decision trees) may have a role to play. When other stressors are present quantile regression allows thresholds to be established which set limits above which nutrients are likely to influence the biota, irrespective of other pressures. The statistical methods in the toolkit may be useful as part of a management strategy, but more sophisticated approaches, often generating thresholds appropriate to individual water bodies rather than to broadly defined "types", are likely to be necessary too. The importance of understanding underlying ecological processes as well as correct selection and application of methods is emphasised, along with the need to consider local regulatory and decision-making systems, and the ease with which outcomes can be communicated to non-technical audiences.

Combined effects of heatwaves and micropollutants on freshwater ecosystems: Towards an integrated assessment of extreme events in multiple stressors research

Freshwater ecosystems are strongly influenced by weather extremes such as heatwaves (HWs), which are predicted to increase in frequency and magnitude in the future. In addition to these climate extremes, the freshwater realm is impacted by the exposure to various classes of chemicals emitted by anthropogenic activities. Currently, there is limited knowledge on how the combined exposure to HWs and chemicals affects the structure and functioning of freshwater ecosystems. Here, we review the available literature describing the single and combined effects of HWs and chemicals on different levels of biological organization, to obtain a holistic view of their potential interactive effects. We only found a few studies (13 out of the 61 studies included in this review) that investigated the biological effects of HWs in combination with chemical pollution. The reported interactive effects of HWs and chemicals varied largely not only within the different trophic levels but also depending on the studied endpoints for populations or individuals. Hence, owing also to the little number of studies available, no consistent interactive effects could be highlighted at any level of biological organization. Moreover, we found an imbalance towards single species and population experiments, with only five studies using a multitrophic approach. This results in a knowledge gap for relevant community and ecosystem level endpoints, which prevents the exploration of important indirect effects that can compromise food web stability. Moreover, this knowledge gap impairs the validity of chemical risk assessments and our ability to protect ecosystems. Finally, we highlight the urgency of integrating extreme events into multiple stressors studies and provide specific recommendations to guide further experimental research in this regard.

Extreme flood disturbance effects on multiple dimensions of river invertebrate community stability

Multidimensional analysis of community stability has recently emerged as an overarching approach to evaluating ecosystem response to disturbance. However, the approach has previously been applied only in experimental and modelling studies. We applied this concept to an 18-year time series (2000-2017) of macroinvertebrate community dynamics from a southeast Alaskan river to further develop and test the approach in relation to the effects of two extreme flood events occurring in 2005 (event 1) and 2014 (event 2). Five components of stability were calculated for pairs of pre- or post-event years. Individual components were tested for differences between pre- and post-event time periods. Stability components' pairwise correlations were assessed and ellipsoids of stability were developed for each time period and compared to a null model derived from the permuted dataset. Only one stability component demonstrated a significant difference between time periods. In contrast, 80% of moderate and significant correlations between stability components were degraded post-disturbance and significant changes to the form of stability ellipsoids were observed. Ellipsoids of stability for all periods after the initial disturbance (2005) were not different to the null model. Our results illustrate that the dimensionality of stability approach can be applied to natural ecosystem time-series data. The major increase in dimensionality of stability observed following disturbance potentially indicates significant shifts in the processes which drive stability following disturbance. This evidence improves our understanding of community response beyond what is possible through analysis of individual stability components.