Aridity and soil fertility, not species richness, interact to affect temporal stability of primary productivity along a natural gradient in northern China

There is mounting evidence from experimental studies that drought and nutrient enrichment can interact to impact the biodiversity and productivity of terrestrial ecosystems. Whether such interactive effect influences plant diversity and the temporal stability of community productivity of natural ecosystems is unknown. To fill this knowledge gap, we combined a field survey of plant diversity and soil conditions with remote sensing temporal estimates of primary productivity in grasslands along a natural gradient in northern China. We found that aridity and soil ammonium (NH₄⁺-N) interacted to influence temporal stability of NDVI. That is, the relationship between ammonium and temporal stability of NDVI shifted from positive to negative due to increased standard deviation of NDVI with increasing aridity. Species richness was not related to temporal stability because it influenced the mean and standard deviation of NDVI proportionally. As a result, soil fertility outweighed the contribution of species richness to temporal stability. Our study demonstrates the synergistic effect of aridity and soil fertility, but not species richness, on temporal stability along a large natural gradient. Predicting how environmental drivers affect diversity and the stable provisioning of ecosystem services in real-world ecosystems therefore requires a better understanding of the complex interactions among environmental drivers.