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Long-term decline in grassland productivity driven by increasing dryness.

ABSTRACT: Increasing aridity and drought severity forecast for many land areas could reduce the land carbon (C) sink. However, with limited long-term direct measures, it is difficult to distinguish direct drying effects from counter effects of CO2 enrichment and nitrogen (N) deposition. Here, we document a >50% decline in production of a native C3 grassland over four decades and assign the forcing and timing to increasing aridity and specifically to declining late-summer rainfall. Analysis of C and N stable isotopes in biomass suggests that enhanced water use efficiency via CO2 enrichment may have slightly ameliorated the productivity decline but that changes in N had no effects. Identical declines in a long-term snow-addition experiment definitively identified increasing late-summer dryness as the cause. Our results demonstrate lasting consequences of recent climate change on grassland production and underscore the importance of understanding past climate-ecosystem coupling to predicting future responses to changing climate.

SUBMITTER: Brookshire EN

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4479003 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Long-term decline in grassland productivity driven by increasing dryness.

Brookshire E N J EN Weaver T T

Nature communications 20150514

Increasing aridity and drought severity forecast for many land areas could reduce the land carbon (C) sink. However, with limited long-term direct measures, it is difficult to distinguish direct drying effects from counter effects of CO2 enrichment and nitrogen (N) deposition. Here, we document a >50% decline in production of a native C3 grassland over four decades and assign the forcing and timing to increasing aridity and specifically to declining late-summer rainfall. Analysis of C and N stab ...[more]

PMID: 25972300

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Project description:The management of climate-resilient grassland systems is important for stable livestock fodder production. In the face of climate change, maintaining productivity while minimizing yield variance of grassland systems is increasingly challenging. To achieve climate-resilient and stable productivity of grasslands, a better understanding of the climatic drivers of long-term trends in yield variance and its dependence on agronomic inputs is required. Based on the Park Grass Experiment at Rothamsted (UK), we report for the first time the long-term trends in yield variance of grassland (1965-2018) in plots given different fertilizer and lime applications, with contrasting productivity and plant species diversity. We implemented a statistical model that allowed yield variance to be determined independently of yield level. Environmental abiotic covariates were included in a novel criss-cross regression approach to determine climatic drivers of yield variance and its dependence on agronomic management. Our findings highlight that sufficient liming and moderate fertilization can reduce yield variance while maintaining productivity and limiting loss of plant species diversity. Plots receiving the highest rate of nitrogen fertilizer or farmyard manure had the highest yield but were also more responsive to environmental variability and had less plant species diversity. We identified the days of water stress from March to October and temperature from July to August as the two main climatic drivers, explaining approximately one-third of the observed yield variance. These drivers helped explain consistent unimodal trends in yield variance-with a peak in approximately 1995, after which variance declined. Here, for the first time, we provide a novel statistical framework and a unique long-term dataset for understanding the trends in yield variance of managed grassland. The application of the criss-cross regression approach in other long-term agro-ecological trials could help identify climatic drivers of production risk and to derive agronomic strategies for improving the climate resilience of cropping systems.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13593-023-00885-w.

Dataset Information

Long-term decline in grassland productivity driven by increasing dryness.

Publications

Long-term decline in grassland productivity driven by increasing dryness.

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