Determining the factors that affect community stability is crucial to understanding the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in the face of global warming. We investigated how four temperature components (that is, median, variability, trend and extremes) affected diversity–synchrony–stability relationships for 1,246 bird and 580 fish communities from temperate regions. We hypothesized a stabilizing effect on the community if the variation in species’ response to changing median temperature decreases overall community synchrony (hypothesis H1) and if temperature extremes reduce interspecific synchrony at extreme abundances due to variation in species’ thermal tolerance limits (hypothesis H2). We found support for H1 in fish and for H2 in bird communities. Here we showed that the abiotic components (that is, the median, variability, trend and extremes of temperature) had more indirect effects on community stability, predominantly by affecting the biotic components (that is, diversity, synchrony). Considering various temperature components’ direct as well as indirect impacts on stability for terrestrial versus aquatic communities will improve our mechanistic understanding of biodiversity change in response to global climatic stressors.

确定影响群落稳定的因素对于了解在全球变暖的情况下维护生物多样性和生态系统功能至关重要。我们研究了四个温度分量（即中位数、变率、趋势和极端值）如何影响温带地区 1,246 个鸟类和 580 个鱼类群落的多样性-同步-稳定性关系。我们假设，如果物种对中位温度变化的响应变化降低了整体群落同步性（假设 H1），并且如果极端温度由于物种耐热极限的变化而降低了极端丰度的种间同步性（假设 H2），则对群落有稳定作用。我们在鱼类中发现了对 H1 的支持，在鸟类群落中发现了对 H2 的支持。在这里，我们表明非生物成分（即中位数、可变性、趋势和极端温度）对群落稳定性有更间接的影响，主要是通过影响生物成分（即多样性、同步性）。考虑各种温度成分对陆地和水生群落稳定性的直接和间接影响，将提高我们对响应全球气候压力源的生物多样性变化的机制理解。