{
  "abstract": "Diverse plant communities usually produce more biomass than monocultures, an advantage that strengthens over time and is attributed mainly to the complementarity effect - the extra biomass produced, relative to monocultures, when species exploit different resources, share fewer enemies or facilitate one another. Yet whether this advantage is a mere tendency of diverse communities, or something that every persistent community must have, has remained unknown. Here we show that stable coexistence requires a positive complementarity effect, with vanishingly rare exceptions, and that underyielding communities are significantly more likely to lose a species within two years or sampling steps, across four long-term biodiversity experiments, with odds of losing a species nearly three times higher than in other communities. In the twenty-five years since the complementarity effect was defined, the link between biodiversity effects and species coexistence had only been established theoretically for two species in competition or observed as a correlation; our theoretical result makes it a general property of multispecies communities, in which the complementarity effect scales with two established measures of how securely species coexist - local and structural stability. Our analyses are, to our knowledge, the first to test a coexistence prediction - impending species loss - prospectively in biodiversity experiments, from a functioning measure alone, turning a measure of what diversity does into a diagnostic of whether diversity can persist. Stable coexistence and higher productivity are thus intrinsically linked: biodiversity does not merely benefit ecosystem production on average; biodiversity that endures cannot but benefit it through complementarity. We anticipate that this diagnostic will turn existing biodiversity experiments, sown grasslands and intercrops into early-warning systems for species loss, since it requires only the biomass of each species in mixture and in monoculture - data these systems already collect, and that agronomists already combine into the land equivalent ratio - and that it will extend to forests, through the growing networks of tree diversity experiments and mixed-species plantations where the same measurements are made.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "University of Fribourg"
  ],
  "article_type": "New results",
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 4,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "M. Desallais"
    },
    {
      "name": "M. Loreau"
    },
    {
      "name": "J.-F. Arnoldi"
    },
    {
      "name": "R. P. Rohr"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/921133vzgz9ng.bib",
  "cited_by": 1,
  "doi": "10.64898/2026.09.17.752039",
  "fulltext_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.17.752039v1.full",
  "id": "921133vzgz9ng",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.17.752039v1",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY",
  "licence_label": "CC BY",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "biorxiv",
      "ecology"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "2309|Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7213558297",
  "pdf_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.17.752039v1.full.pdf",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-17",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/921133vzgz9ng.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:23:00Z",
      "native_id": "10.64898/2026.09.17.752039",
      "source": "biorxiv",
      "url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.17.752039v2"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "biology",
      "origin": "biorxiv:ecology",
      "subfield": "ecology"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Stable coexistence and higher productivity are intrinsically linked in multispecies communities",
  "title_text": "Stable coexistence and higher productivity are intrinsically linked in multispecies communities",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:29:46Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/921133vzgz9ng",
  "venue": "bioRxiv",
  "versions": []
}