Warming modulates consumer effects on ecosystem stability through shifts in stabilizing mechanisms; Data and script

<p dir="ltr">Abstract: </p><p dir="ltr"><b>1.</b> Climate warming is impacting ecosystem stability across diverse ecosystems, but our understanding of the involved mechanisms and possible interactive effects with other stability drivers, is still limited. </p><p dir="ltr"><b>2.</b> We conducted a field experiment to evaluate the individual and combined effects of warming and rodent herbivores on salt marsh functional (total plant cover) and compositional temporal stability as well as on their main proposed drivers.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>3.</b> Results show that warming and herbivory interactively reduced functional stability and that their combined effects were subadditive.

In contrast, compositional stability increased with warming and was not affected by herbivory, revealing a decoupling between the two facets of ecosystem stability under global change. Indeed, functional and compositional stability were positively related under ambient conditions but both became non significantly related under warming. Herbivory primarily affected community structure by reducing dominant species abundance and decreasing species asynchrony, whereas warming mainly decreased it by decreasing species asynchrony.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Synthesis.</b> Our findings highlight that warming not only can affect ecosystem stability, but also shift the importance of control mechanisms from dominance to asynchrony, decoupling different ecosystem stability facets.