Species niches may impact population and community stability by influencing average population sizes and species richness, however, niche-based approaches are rarely applied when studying stability in natural communities. Here we utilise a niche-based approach to link niche characteristics to community stability in 140 European butterfly communities. We represent niches as hyper-volumes and generate metrics for niche overlap, mismatch, and volume. Using structural equation modelling we then test five hypotheses linking niche and community characteristics to mechanisms influencing community stability. We find that the position of a site relative to the niches of the species pool predicts species richness, and that sites with species near the centre of their niche have higher mean abundance. We then show that niche position and size influence population stability, and species richness increases asynchrony which subsequently influences community stability. Our approach demonstrates that niches metrics are useful tools for understanding the dynamics of natural communities.

Insect declines have been reported widely and are expected to alter ecosystem functions and processes. Land-use change is recognised as a major cause of decline in insect biodiversity and abundance. Variation in local environmental drivers and the scale of available monitoring data have left large knowledge gaps in which taxa are declining and where declines are the greatest, and how these declines will impact ecosystems. We used 11 years (2006-2016) of monitoring data on 40 farms distributed over ~10,000 km2 in southern Québec, Canada, to quantify the impact of agricultural intensity on temporal trends in abundance and biomass of Diptera (true flies). There was a large difference in temporal trends between farms, which we found to be driven by agricultural landcover. Contrary to expectation, increases in abundance over time were greater in areas with higher agricultural intensity, especially with an increase in cereal crops. In contrast, declines in dipteran biomass were steeper in areas of higher agricultural intensity, although only with greater maize and soy production rather than cereals such as wheat. Variation in forest cover around farms had the least effect on trends. We found steeper declines in biomass per total number of Diptera with increasing agricultural cover, suggesting the presence of community turnover toward smaller-bodied flies with lower individual biomass. Our results reveal further complexities in insect trends driven by changes in land-use and show the importance of long-term monitoring and the use of multiple indicators for understanding biodiversity change.