Asynchrony‐to‐averaging stabilization shift in alpine grassland restoration

Maintaining temporal community stability during ecological restoration is essential for sustaining ecosystem services, yet how stabilizing pathways shift directionally across restoration stages remains poorly understood. Here, we investigated the temporal dynamics of three stabilizing effects (dominance, asynchrony and averaging effects) during alpine grassland restoration on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau over a 13‐year sequence.

Temporal stability was partitioned into dominance, asynchrony and averaging effects and tracked across nine consecutive 5‐year rolling windows, integrating longitudinal monitoring (Years 1–5) with a chronosequence approach (Years 6–13). Community evenness, species richness and stability trajectories were modelled using linear mixed‐effects models, and mediation analysis examined the pathway linking evenness to the dominance effect via Taylor's scaling exponent b .

Community evenness increased overall despite declining species richness ( R ²  = 0.834, p  < 0.001). The composition of stabilizing pathways shifted progressively along the restoration sequence, from asynchrony‐dominated in early stages to averaging effect‐dominated in the later, chronosequence‐based windows.

Notably, the averaging effect reversed from destabilizing ( ω  > 1) when diversity was low to strongly stabilizing as the community developed. Evenness regulated the dominance effect primarily through Taylor's scaling exponent b , with the indirect pathway accounting for most of the total mediation effect (Sobel test: Z  = −4.54, p  < 0.001).

Synthesis . Stabilizing pathways shift sequentially during restoration, with statistical averaging superseding asynchrony‐based stabilization in the later stages. Rather than net stability alone, it is the changing composition of stabilizing mechanisms that best characterizes how communities are stabilized as restoration proceeds. These findings identify a management opportunity in mid‐to‐late restoration, during which promoting species evenness may strengthen the mechanisms underpinning long‐term community stability.