Abstract
Anthropogenic activities are bringing unforeseen alterations to
disturbance regimes, exposing many ecosystems to multiple novel
disturbances simultaneously. Despite this, how biodiversity responds to
simultaneous disturbances remains unclear, with conflicting empirical
results on their interactive effects. Here, we experimentally test how
one disturbance (an invasive species) affects the diversity of a
community over multiple levels of another disturbance regime (pulse
mortality). Specifically, we invade stably coexisting bacterial
communities under four different pulse frequencies, and compare their
final resident diversity to uninvaded communities under the same pulse
mortality regimes. We find that the disturbances synergistically
interact such that the invader significantly reduces resident diversity
at high pulse frequency, but not at low. This work therefore highlights
the need to study simultaneous disturbance effects over multiple
disturbance regimes as well as to carefully document unmanipulated
disturbances, and may help explain the conflicting results seen in
previous multiple-disturbance work.