Fig. 1: Diagram illustrating how biodiversity influences community stability via its effects on species-averaged population stability and species asynchrony.

Empirical studies show that biodiversity may increase or decrease population stability, but it generally promotes asynchrony (a; adapted from Xu et al.7). Asynchrony can be further decomposed multiplicatively into an effect of compensatory dynamics (CPE) and a statistical-averaging effect (SAE; b). We assessed how biodiversity separately alters CPE and SAE.