The Long and Short of Biodiversity: Cumulative Diversity and Its Drivers

Long-term or cumulative diversity is the biodiversity that accumulates at a site over many generations of community members. Cumulative diversity is likely important to the intrinsic and functional value of ecosystems given the legacies left behind by many species. While its components—average short-term diversity (alpha) and temporal turnover (beta)—have been extensively studied, cumulative diversity itself has not. We therefore examined the environmental and community drivers of cumulative diversity with a novel hierarchical diversity partition. This partition breaks cumulative diversity into short-term, turnover, richness, and evenness components. We applied this framework to 49 tropical rock pool communities, censused over tens to hundreds of organism generations. Results uncovered two environmental regimes that differentially impacted the richness and evenness components of cumulative diversity: Occasional drying events mainly limited richness and reset communities, while less severe physicochemical variations reduced the evenness of communities. These causal pathways amount to differential controls on cumulative diversity; controls that can oppose each other to buffer diversity against change as well as create unexpected trade-offs for managers. We conclude that maintaining diversity at longer timescales requires new analytical tools and an expanded view that can account for its complexity.