Abstract
There remains considerable doubt, debate, and confusion regarding how biodiversity responds to gradients of important environmental drivers, such as habitat size, resource productivity, and disturbance. Here we develop a simple but comprehensive theoretical framework based on competition–colonization multispecies communities to examine the separate and interactive effects of these drivers. Using both numerical simulations and analytical arguments, we demonstrate that the critical trade‐off between competitive and colonization ability can lead to complex nonlinear, zig‐zag responses in both species richness and the inverse Simpson index along gradients of these drivers. Furthermore, we find strong interactions between these drivers that can dramatically shift the response of biodiversity to these gradients. The zig‐zag patterns in biodiversity along ecological gradients, together with the strong interactions between the drivers, can explain the mixed findings of empirical studies and syntheses, thereby providing a new paradigm that can reconcile debates on the relationships between biodiversity and multiple drivers.