Table 1.

Summary of variability metrics, notation, and descriptions

Name	Notation	Technical description	Ecological description
Gamma stability	γstb	Temporal stability of abundance of all plots within a study site	Ecosystem stability of a collection of local communities – at the metacommunity scale
Spatial synchrony	φ	The degree that plot‐level abundances align to one another through time within a study site	The level to which local communities vary similarly in certain years. Potentially influenced by heterogeneity of communities, populations, and/or physical conditions across communities
Spatial stabilisation	$\sqrt{\frac{1}{\mathrm{\phi }}}$	The inverse of the among‐plot synchrony of local community abundance through time	The factor by which temporal stability is increased when moving from the community to the metacommunity scale
Alpha stability	αstb	Temporal variability of total plant abundance at the plot scale	Stability at the local community scale. Influenced by growth strategies of component species (Sp stb) and/or by the synchrony of different species abundance through time (φsp)
Species stability	Sp stb	Species‐level stability within a plot, first averaged over species within plots, then averaged over plots to obtain a single value for each study site	How variable individual species abundances are from year to year. Heavily influenced by growth strategies of dominant species
Species synchrony	φsp	The degree that species abundances align with other species’ abundance through time, averaged over plots to obtain a single value for each study site	Different species responding in different ways through time. Likely driven strongly by functional diversity among species within a community
Population synchrony	φpop	The degree that a species’ abundance through time within one plot aligns with its abundance in different plots. Averaged across species to obtain a single value for each study site	Different populations of the same species responding differently through time in different communities. Likely driven by genotypic heterogeneity, interspecific competition, and/or different physical environments among patches

See Wang & Loreau (2014) for more detail about calculating variability metrics.