This work reframes how we think about the diversity–stability relationship and highlights the power of response diversity as a stabilizing force.
With: Til Hämmig, @owpet.bsky.social & @pennekampster.bsky.social

Structural equation models showed that asynchrony and population stability—both shaped by imbalance—explained most of the variation in community stability.
This suggests that in our system species’ fundamental responses (measured in monocultures) determine stability, not interactions.

Key finding:
A new metric—imbalance—captures how unevenly species respond to the environment.
→ Lower imbalance = higher community stability
→ Richness alone had no effect!

We show that it’s not richness, but how differently species respond to the environment.
🔬 Using protist microcosms, we manipulated:

🌡️ Temperature fluctuations
🧪 Nutrient levels
🌱 Species richness
📈 Distribution of species’ thermal performance curves

Very exciting and fun collaboration with @pennekampster.bsky.social, @gsimpson.bsky.social, Romana Limberger, Sam Ross, and Owen Petchey

We then used simulated species responses to investigate what determines response diversity in a multifarious environmental change context.

We propose a new way of calculating response diversity that is unrelated to the environmental change a community experiences, and that describes the insurance capacity of a community to all possible environmental changes.