Abstract
When the species composition of ecological communities changes over time, environmental drivers are often invoked as the most plausible explanation. Several lines of reasoning, however, suggest that such compositional change, called temporal species turnover, can similarly result from intrinsic ecosystem dynamics, even in a constant environment. The degree to which these two drivers contribute to observed turnover remains unclear. To address this conundrum, we analyse the well-established BioTIME database of surveys. We expect either an acceleration of turnover with accelerating climate change or constant turnover if intrinsic mechanisms dominate. Surprisingly we find instead that species turnover over short time intervals (1-5 years) has decelerated in significantly more communities during the last 100 years than it has accelerated, typically by one third. The observed slowing of turnover, we argue, could be understood—when intrinsic dynamics dominate—as resulting because anthropogenic environmental degradation or declines of regional species pools reduce the number of potential colonisers driving turnover. Our results suggest that observed past changes in species composition were often manifestations of natural, intrinsic ecosystem dynamics. Although one can expect environmental drivers to dominate species turnover eventually as climate change accelerates further, for now such attribution should be done with caution.
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Intrinsic ecological dynamics drive biodiversity turnover in model metacommunities
Warming and cooling catalyse widespread temporal turnover in biodiversity
Temporal complexity of terrestrial ecosystem functioning and its drivers
Data availability
The data underlying this study were sourced from the BioTIME database28. A file listing for each breakyear, lag, metric and community the corresponding turnover rates before and since the breakyear, has been deposited in the Zenodo database with [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17791135]. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The code used for our analyses has been deposited in the Zenodo database with [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17791135].
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge discussion of this study with Chris Terry. This work was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) [grant number NE/T003510/1] (AGR).
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A.G.R. acquired funding, and designed and conceptualised the study. E.C.N. developed and tested the methods, performed the data analyses, and wrote the original draft. E.C.N. and A.G.R. jointly tested the code, reviewed, and edited the manuscript and developed data visualisation.
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Nwankwo, E.C., Rossberg, A.G. Widespread slowdown in short-term species turnover despite accelerating climate change.
Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68187-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68187-1
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