Diversity begets stability: Sublinear growth and competitive coexistence across ecosystems

Onofri Mazzarisi (Trieste, Italy): The worldwide loss of species diversity brings urgency to understanding how diverse ecosystems maintain stability. Whereas early ecological ideas and classic observations suggested that stabil-ity increases with diversity, ecological theory makes the opposite prediction, leading to the long-standing “diversity-stability debate.” I will discuss how this puzzle can be resolved if growth scales as a sublinear power law with biomass, exhibiting a form of population self-regulation analogous to models of individual ontogeny. Typical forms of competitive interactions among populations with sublinear growth do not lead to exclusion but promote stability at higher diversity. The model proposed realigns theory with classic observations and predicts large-scale macroecological pat-terns. I will conclude by discussing the challenges and perspectives of determining the form of population self-regulation in time series beyond its role in community dynamics and the diversity-stability relationship.