PubMed · 2026-07-07
A large-scale forest experiment found that diverse communities of plant-eaters stabilize plant populations more powerfully than plant diversity alone. When more herbivore species are present, individual plant species stay more stable over time, and those stabilizing effects ripple upward through entire forest communities.
Herbivore species diversity exerted stronger stabilizing effects on plant communities than plant diversity did, with top-down regulation clearly dominating over bottom-up effects
Diverse herbivore communities increased both individual plant species stability and asynchrony among plant species, so different plants' population swings cancelled each other out
Stabilizing effects cascaded across all organizational levels, from individual plant populations to whole metacommunities spanning multiple habitat patches