Stable coexistence and higher productivity are intrinsically linked in multispecies communities
- 1University of Fribourg
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.
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BibTeX
@misc{desallais2026stable,
title = {{Stable coexistence and higher productivity are intrinsically linked in multispecies communities}},
author = {M. Desallais and M. Loreau and J.-F. Arnoldi and R. P. Rohr},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.17.752039},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.17.752039v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Stable coexistence and higher productivity are intrinsically linked in multispecies communities
AU - M. Desallais
AU - M. Loreau
AU - J.-F. Arnoldi
AU - R. P. Rohr
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/17
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.17.752039
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.17.752039v1
AB - 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.
ER -