A marine heatwave changes the stabilizing effects of biodiversity in kelp forests

Abstract

Biodiversity can stabilize ecological communities through biological insurance, but climate and other environmental changes may disrupt this process via simultaneous ecosystem destabilization and biodiversity loss. While changes to diversity–stability relationships (DSRs) and the underlying mechanisms have been extensively explored in terrestrial plant communities, this topic remains largely unexplored in benthic marine ecosystems that comprise diverse assemblages of producers and consumers. By analyzing two decades of kelp forest biodiversity survey data, we discovered changes in diversity, stability, and their relationships at multiple scales (biological organizational levels, spatial scales, and functional groups) that were linked with the most severe marine heatwave ever documented in the North Pacific Ocean. Moreover, changes in the strength of DSRs during/after the heatwave were more apparent among functional groups than both biological organizational levels (population vs. ecosystem levels) and spatial scales (local vs. broad scales). Specifically, the strength of DSRs decreased for fishes, increased for mobile invertebrates and understory algae, and were unchanged for sessile invertebrates during/after the heatwave. Our findings suggest that biodiversity plays a key role in stabilizing marine ecosystems, but the resilience of DSRs to adverse climate impacts primarily depends on the functional identities of ecological communities.