The emergence of macroecology–coupled with the availability of long-term monitoring ecological datasets–has allowed for the testing and forecasting of ecological interactions at global scales. Community stability is hypothesized to increase with species richness and decrease with interspecific synchrony. Despite (a)synchrony being fundamental to the maintenance of diversity over time, there are few large-scale empirical tests of such theory, mainly focusing on terrestrial plants (Valencia et al. 2020). As a leading postdoc in the Blue-Green Biodiversity research initiative project, I compiled by far the largest collection of community time series LTER data (>=20 years) across terrestrial and freshwater taxa and tested how community synchrony could be understood by species richness, overall synchrony (variance ratio) and tail-dependent synchrony (Ghosh et al., GEB, 2025). This work will open up more investigations across scales to get a better mechanistic understanding of community stability in the face of global change. For example, see our papers (1, 2, 3) to understand the mean-variance fluctuation relationships in time, and mechanisms behind changing community stability due to temperature change.
Publications
Shyamolina Ghosh, Blake Matthews, Sarah R Supp, Roel Van Klink, Francesco Pomati, James A Rusak, Imran Khaliq, Niklaus E Zimmermann, Thomas Wohlgemuth, Ole Seehausen, others
Global Ecology and Biogeography, vol. 34, Wiley Online Library, 2025, pp. e70013
Shyamolina Ghosh, Blake Matthews
Ecology, 2024
Shyamolina Ghosh, Blake Matthews, Sarah R. Supp, Roel van Klink, Francesco Pomati, James A. Rusak, Imran Khaliq, Niklaus E. Zimmermann, Ole Seehausen, Christian Rixen, Martin M. Gossner, Anita Narwani, Jonathan M. Chase, Catherine H. Graham
Zenodo, 2023 Aug