Abstract
Understanding the stability of ecological communities is a matter of increasing importance in the context of global environmental change. Yet, it has proved to be a challenging task. Different metrics are used to assess the stability of ecological systems, and the choice of one metric over another may result in conflicting conclusions. Although each of the multitude of metrics is useful for answering a specific question about stability, the relationship among metrics is poorly un-derstood. Such lack of understanding prevents scientists from devel-oping a unified concept of stability. Instead, by investigating these relationships we can unveil how many ‘dimensions’ of stability there are (i.e. in how many independent components stability metrics can be grouped), which should help building a more comprehensive con-cept of stability. Here, we simultaneously measured 27 stability met-rics frequently used in ecological studies. Our approach is based on dynamical simulations of multispecies trophic communities under different perturbation scenarios. Mapping the relationships between the metrics revealed that they can be lumped into three main groups of relatively independent stability components: ‘early response to pulse’, ‘sensitivities to press’ and ‘distance to threshold’. Selecting metrics from each of these groups allows a more accurate and com-prehensive quantification of the overall stability of ecological com-munities. These results contribute to improving our understanding and assessment of stability in ecological communities.