Abstract
Evidence shows that local functional trait composition and diversity along the fast–slow leaf economics spectrum can predict the temporal stability of community productivity in response to environmental changes. However, it remains unclear whether these relationships persist at larger spatial scales. Combining a field survey of plant diversity with remote sensing estimates of primary productivity across a large environmental gradient in 235 grasslands across the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the Inner Mongolia Plateau, we find that species richness contributes to stabilizing productivity, while functional diversity contributes to destabilizing productivity at the local scale. In contrast, we find no evidence that variation in species richness and functional diversity among local communities contributes to stabilizing productivity across larger spatial scales. While the relationships between environmental conditions and local diversity and stability differ between the two regions, the overall positive relationships between diversity and stability are consistent at both the local and larger spatial scales. Our study offers insights into how functional traits along the fast-slow leaf economics spectrum mediate the effects of environmental factors (e.g., precipitation) on ecosystem stability at contrasting spatial scales.
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Decadal-scale observations are key to detecting the stabilizing effects of plant diversity in natural ecosystems
Environmental heterogeneity modulates the effect of plant diversity on the spatial variability of grassland biomass
Effects of plant diversity on productivity strengthen over time due to trait-dependent shifts in species overyielding
Data availability
NDVI data were extracted from the NASA Landsat satellite mission via the GEE platform at earthengine.google.com. The temperature and precipitation data were extracted from NASA FLDAS58 at disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/datasets/FLDAS_NOAH01_C_GL_M_001/summary?keywords=FLDAS. All aggregated data used in the analyses and visualization are available via Figshare, https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.27169641.
Code availability
The main R code used in this study is available at the figshare repository, https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.27169641.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grants No. 2023YFF0806800 to X.L.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 32422054 and 32371611 to X.L., 32201299 to Y.X.), the Gansu Science and Technology Project (Grants No. 23ZDNA009, 24ZDNA002 and 24ZD13NA016 to X.L.), the Project of Qinghai Science & Technology Department (Grants No. 2024-SF-102 to X.L.), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grants No. lzujbky-2023-ey12 to X.L., lzujbky-2022-15 to Y.X.), the Fundamental and Interdisciplinary Disciplines Breakthrough Plan of the Ministry of Education of China (Grants No. JYB2025XDXM910 to X.L.), the Open Project of the State Key Laboratory for Vegetation Structure, Function and Construction (VegLabOF2025007 to Y.X.), and by the María de Maeztu Excellence Unit 2023-2027 Ref. CEX2021-001201-M, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. D.M. is supported by a Ramon y Cajal fellowship from the Ministry of Science and Innovation (RYC2020-028780-I), an Ikerbasque Research Professorship, and the European Research Council (ERC Consolidator Grant, RECODYN 101043548). We thank Mu Liu, Li Zhang, and Kui Hu for support with field data collection, Junsheng Ke for map production, Job de Vries and Jie Peng for remote sensing data collection, and Jacqueline Oehri for sharing the code to smooth NDVI time series data.
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M.H., Y.H., and X.L. conceived and designed the study. X.L., Y.X., and M.H. collected the data. M.H. and Y.H. conducted statistical analyses with contributions from R.R.G. and D.M. All coauthors discussed the results and contributed to the final version. M.H. and Y.H. wrote the initial manuscript with inputs from all coauthors.
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Huang, M., Granjel, R.R., Montoya, D. et al. Plant diversity within communities, not among them, stabilizes grassland productivity across spatial scales.
Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69028-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69028-5
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