Urbanization and agricultural intensification destabilize animal communities differently than diversity loss.

Despite growing concern over consequences of global changes, we still know little about potential interactive effects of anthropogenic perturbations and diversity loss on the stability of local communities, especially for taxa other than plants. Here we analyse the relationships among landscape composition, biodiversity and community stability looking at time series of three types of communities, i.e., bats, birds and butterflies, monitored over the years by citizen science programs in France. We show that urban and intensive agricultural landscapes as well as diversity loss destabilize these communities but in different ways: while diversity loss translates into greater population synchrony, urban and intensive agricultural landscapes mainly decrease mean population stability. In addition to highlight the stabilizing effects of diversity on ecologically important but overlooked taxa, our results further reveal new pathways linking anthropogenic activities to diversity and stability. Environmental change and species diversity could jointly affect the stability of animal communities. Here the authors use citizen science data on bats, birds, and butterflies along urbanization and agricultural intensification gradients in France to show that both environmental change and diversity loss destabilise communities, but in different ways.