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Reply to: Crop asynchrony stabilizes food production

Nature volume 588, page E13 (2020)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 09 December 2020

replying to L. Egli et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2965-6 (2020)

In the accompanying Comment, Egli et al.1 report findings related to our Article2 on the stabilization of food production by crop diversity. In our Article, we reported that crop diversity stabilized the combined caloric yield of all crops in a nation2. Our analyses showed that the portfolio effect3 was the probable cause of this greater stability, and we found no support for the asynchrony hypothesis4. Egli et al.1 report somewhat different findings.

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References

  1. Egli, L., Schröter, M., Scherber, C., Tscharntke, T. & Seppelt, R. Crop asynchrony stabilizes food production. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2965-6 (2020).

  2. Renard, D. & Tilman, D. National food production stabilized by crop diversity. Nature 571, 257–260 (2019).

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  3. Doak, D. F. et al. The statistical inevitability of stability–diversity relationships in community ecology. Am. Nat. 151, 264–276 (1998).

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  4. Loreau, M. & De Mazancourt, C. Species asynchrony and its drivers: neutral and nonneutral community dynamics in fluctuating environments. Am. Nat. 172, E48–E66 (2008).

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  5. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistics (FAO, accessed January 2019); https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Bren School of Environment Science and Management of the University of California Santa Barbara for support leading to the initial publication. This work was also supported by a grant overseen by the French ‘Programme Investissement d’Avenir’ as part of the ‘Make Our Planet Great Again’ programme (reference: 17-MPGA-0004) and by a National Science Foundation grant (LTER-1831944).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CEFE, CNRS, Univ. Montpellier, University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, EPHE, IRD, Montpellier, France

    Delphine Renard

  2. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    David Tilman

  3. Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St Paul, MN, USA

    David Tilman

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  1. Delphine Renard
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  2. David Tilman
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D.R. and D.T. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Delphine Renard.

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Renard, D., Tilman, D. Reply to: Crop asynchrony stabilizes food production. Nature 588, E13 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2966-5

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