The Wang Shaopeng Research Group of Chenghuan College wrote in "Nature? Ecology and Evolution published a paper to reveal the multi-scale stabilization of biodiversity

Natural ecosystems provide a variety of functions and services for human society
.
In the context of global change, maintaining the stability of ecosystems has become one of the key goals of
sustainable development.
Many studies have shown that ecosystems with higher diversity have greater stability
.
Although the "diversity-stability" theory has matured since the 1990s, previous studies have focused on small-scale experimental communities, and it is unclear
whether this theory can be extended to large-scale natural communities.
In order to understand this problem, the research group of Wang Shaopeng, a researcher at the School of Urban and Environmental Sciences of Peking University, has carried out a series of theoretical work since 2014, proposing and developing a multi-scale stability theoretical framework, based on which predicting species composition differences (i.
e.
, β diversity) between local communities can promote the stability
of regional-scale ecosystems.
In response to this theoretical framework, a number of recent studies have tested experimental data on plant communities at individual sites, but large-scale empirical evidence across regions is still lacking
.

This study uses plant community datasets from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to examine diversity-stability relationships
at different spatial scales and climatic conditions.
The dataset observed the composition and dynamics of plant communities in different ecosystems on the continental United States at multiple spatial scales using uniform sampling specifications (Figure 1).

The study selected 36 NEON sites (scales) that were continuously monitored for more than 4 years between 2013 and²⁰²⁰, each site included 6-33 400m2 monitoring cells (scales), and each cell monitored a total of 8 samples (scales)
of^1m2.
The results show that the diversity and stability are positively related to multiple spatial scales, such as sample square, monitoring cell and station, and the strength of the diversity-stability relationship shows a weak increasing trend with the increase of the spatial scale (Figure 2).

Temperature and precipitation can affect stability
at different scales in a number of ways.
In particular, the strength of the diversity-stability relationship decreases
significantly with seasonal increases in precipitation.
The results of this study extend the diversity-stability theory to multi-scale frameworks, reveal that biodiversity has a consistent stabilization effect at different spatial scales and climatic conditions, and highlight the importance and necessity of large-scale biodiversity conservation
.

Figure 1.
The National Ecological Observation Network (NEON) investigated the diversity and temporal stability of plant communities at the scale of sample plots, monitoring cells, and stations

Figure 2.
The diversity-stability relationship at different scales (A-E), and the change in the strength of this relationship with the spatial scale (F)

The study, titled "Consistent stabilizing effects of plant diversity across spatial scales and climatic gradients," was published on September 19, 2022 in Nature? Nature Ecology & Evolution magazine
.
The School of Urban and Environmental Sciences of Peking University has been postdoctoral fellow Liang Maowei as the first author, Wang Shaopeng as the corresponding author, and collaborators including a number of ecologists
from Europe and the United States.
The research has been funded
by projects such as the Basic Science Center of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Outstanding Youth Science Fund.