Removing the confounding effect of habitat specialization reveals the stabilizing contribution of diversity to species variability

Earlier studies have found that diversity, S, stabilizes the relative variability of combined biomass or abundance of species making up a community. However, the effect of S on variability of constituent species has been elusive. We hypothesize that the proportion of specialists increases with S and, because specialists are more variable, this shift in composition will mask the stabilizing effect of S on populations of species making up a …