Negative relationships between species richness and temporal variability are common but weak in natural systems

Effects of species diversity on population and community stability (or more precisely, the effects of species richness on temporal variability) have been studied for several decades, but there have been no large‐scale tests in natural communities of predictions from theory. We used 91 data sets including plants, fish, small mammals, zooplankton, birds, and insects, to examine the relationship between species richness and temporal variability in...