Widespread slowdown in short-term species turnover despite accelerating climate change

When the species composition of ecological communities changes over time, environmental drivers are often invoked as the most plausible explanation. Several lines of reasoning, however, suggest that such compositional change, called temporal species turnover, can similarly result from intrinsic ecosystem dynamics, even in a constant environment. The degree to which these two drivers contribute to observed turnover remains unclear. To address this conundrum, we analyse the well-established BioTIME database of surveys. We expect either an acceleration of turnover with accelerating climate change or constant turnover if intrinsic mechanisms dominate. Surprisingly we find instead that species turnover over short time intervals (1-5 years) has decelerated in significantly more communities during the last 100 years than it has accelerated, typically by one third. The observed slowing of turnover, we argue, could be understood-when intrinsic dynamics dominate-as resulting because anthropogenic environmental degradation or declines of regional species pools reduce the number of potential colonisers driving turnover. Our results suggest that observed past changes in species composition were often manifestations of natural, intrinsic ecosystem dynamics. Although one can expect environmental drivers to dominate species turnover eventually as climate change accelerates further, for now such attribution should be done with caution.