Fig. 2

Contribution of different components to the growing season length of simulated plant communities: a Landscape identity, b Community temporal variance, c Community average functioning and d Community asynchrony. In each scenario, lines represent plant communities and colors represent different landscapes. Each dot represents the growing season length of a unique community for a given year, whereas each line shows its inter-annual trend. Scenarios (a) and (b) are destabilizing because communities respond to the climatic and edaphic factors that characterize each landscape each year, which increase variation in the growing season length among landscapes. In contrast, scenarios (c) and (d) are stabilizing because the diversity of plant assemblages averages the variation among landscapes. The percent of variation explained by one component is near 100% in each of the above scenarios