Thank you Alessandro! But I am interested in the relation between temporal variability of species richness (or diversity) and gradients of human disturbance. Temporal variability could be measured by the coeficient of variation among years, for example.

However, your suggestion of a further question ("wihch kind of desired richness...") is interesting.

Perhaps our study of zooplankton in Canadian Lakes provides some indirect information on potential impacts of human disturbance (climate warming) and the spatial variability of species richness (temporal variability awaiting study).

Large-scale geographic patterns of diversity and community structure of pelagic crustacean zooplankton in Canadian lakes. Bernadette Pinel-Alloul, Adrien André, Pierre Legendre, Jeffrey A. Cardille, Kasimierz Patalas and Alex Salki. 2013. Global Ecol. Biogeograp.

Alex Salki, retired research biologist, Freshwater Institute, Winnipeg, Canada

You could check the papers by Langvatn on Norwegian red deer, for example this one at http://www.wildlifebiology.com/Downloads/Article/260/en/oldpath.pdf

Maybe you can read our paper on exactly this issue (De Laender et al., Environ. Sci. Technol. 2012, 46, 9097−9105)

I think there are not many studies on the effects of human impacts on the temporal variability of biotic communities, so I do not expect any "wide-spread opinion" on that. The first thing is to have a readily quantifiable proxy as an index of human impact (effect variable). Second - what are your target communities? Some communites are inherently variables, some not. Then you can apply usual gradient analysis using variability as a response variable.

This is complicated in tropical environments with high within-species heterogeneity. Please see The Open Conservation Biology Journal 5, 25–44 pp, 2011.

Keep in mind that scale will be important. Are you interested in temporal variation over hours, days, years? The kind of disturbance will be important too. Island biogeography theory predicts a decrease in species richness after habitats are fragmented (see Thomas Lovejoy's work). Finally, any temporal effects may be confounded by the shape of the diversity-disturbance relationship. This relationship can be unimodal, monotonic, or multimodal (see International Journal of Ecology

Volume 2011 (2011), Article ID 868426).