Abstract: In the face of an uncertain climatic future, the ability of an ecosystem to respond to perturbations and retain function will become ever more important so those systems are not degraded by large scale disturbance events. A measure of this balance is ecosystem stability. Understanding the present and past stability of a landscape will help land managers to understand where resources could be best applied to maintain or expand stability. The region of study (the Piedmont in NC) is an area of small patch sizes, high timber production and will have a reduced capacity to recover from disturbances under predicted future climates. The diversity-stability hypothesis states that lower diversity will result in less stable ecosystems and by knowing the proxies for stability (diversity score) managers will be able to factor this into their management plans. Diversity will be measured several different ways (species, functional and structural diversity etc.) against several units of measurement for temporal stability (species richness, density, biomass etc.) to asses which metric is the best indicator of stability.
Preliminary results show that, at the plot level, there is a correlation between several metrics of diversity and the stability of the plot biomass while, simultaneously, there appears to be smaller correlation between the stability of the plot density and the diversity metrics. This relationship is expected to carry through to larger scales to also explain ecosystem stability at these scales as well. Further tests will need to be carried out, such as ordination, in order to assess how different forest types, their respective compositions through time and spatial scales correlate with the stability of the area of interest. Understanding the drivers of ecosystem stability will allow for a greater understanding of how to achieve stability and what kinds of plots, stands and forest types produce the greatest amounts of stability.
