The diversity in organismal responses to environmental changes (i.e., response diversity) plays a crucial role in shaping community and ecosystem stability. However, existing measures of response diversity only consider a single environmental variable, whereas natural communities are commonly exposed to changes in multiple environmental variables simultaneously. Thus far, no approach exists to integrate multifarious environmental change and the measurement of response diversity. Here, we show how to consider and quantify response diversity in the context of multifarious environmental change, and in doing so introduce a distinction between response diversity to a defined or anticipated environmental change, and the response capacity to any possible set of (defined or undefined) future environmental changes. First, we describe and illustrate the concepts with empirical data. We reveal the role of the trajectory of environmental change in shaping response diversity when multiple environmental variables fluctuate over time. We show that, when the trajectory of the environmental change is undefined (i.e., there is no information or a priori expectation about how an environmental condition will change in future), we can quantify the response capacity of a community to any possible environmental change scenario. That is, we can estimate the capacity of a system to respond under a range of realistic or extreme environmental changes, with utility for predicting future responses to even multifarious environmental change. Finally, we investigate determinants of response diversity within a multifarious environmental change context. We identify factors such as the diversity of species responses to each environmental variable, the relative influence of different environmental variables and temporal means of environmental variable values as important determinants of response diversity. In doing so, we take an important step towards measuring and understanding the insurance capacity of ecological communities exposed to multifarious environmental change.

中文翻译：

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测量经历多种环境变化的生态群落的响应多样性


生物体对环境变化的反应多样性（即反应多样性）在塑造群落和生态系统稳定性方面起着至关重要的作用。然而，现有的响应多样性测量只考虑单个环境变量，而自然群落通常同时受到多个环境变量的变化。到目前为止，还没有办法将各种环境变化和响应多样性的测量结合起来。在这里，我们展示了如何在多种环境变化的背景下考虑和量化响应多样性，并在此过程中引入对已定义或预期环境变化的响应多样性与对任何可能的（已定义或未定义的）未来环境变化的响应能力之间的区别。首先，我们用实证数据描述和说明这些概念。我们揭示了当多个环境变量随时间波动时，环境变化轨迹在塑造响应多样性中的作用。我们表明，当环境变化的轨迹不确定时（即没有关于未来环境条件将如何变化的信息或先验预期），我们可以量化社区对任何可能的环境变化情景的响应能力。也就是说，我们可以估计系统在一系列现实或极端环境变化下的响应能力，并可用于预测未来对各种环境变化的响应。最后，我们研究了多种环境变化背景下响应多样性的决定因素。 我们将物种对每个环境变量的响应多样性、不同环境变量的相对影响以及环境变量值的时间平均值等因素确定为响应多样性的重要决定因素。在此过程中，我们朝着衡量和了解暴露于各种环境变化的生态群落的保险能力迈出了重要的一步。