Long-term decline in grassland productivity driven by increasing dryness.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Brookshire EN
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4479003 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:Rising atmospheric vapour pressure deficit (VPD) associated with climate change affects boreal forest growth via stomatal closure and soil dryness. However, the relationship between VPD and forest growth depends on the climatic context. Here we assess Canadian boreal forest responses to VPD changes from 1951-2018 using a well-replicated tree-growth increment network with approximately 5,000 species-site combinations. Of the 3,559 successful growth models, we observed a relationship between growth and concurrent summer VPD in one-third of the species-site combinations, and between growth and prior summer VPD in almost half of those combinations. The relationship between previous year VPD and current year growth was almost exclusively negative, while current year VPD also tended to reduce growth. Tree species, age, annual temperature, and soil moisture primarily determined tree VPD responses. Younger trees and species like white spruce and Douglas fir exhibited higher VPD sensitivity, as did areas with high annual temperature and low soil moisture. Since 1951, summer VPD increases in Canada have paralleled tree growth decreases, particularly in spruce species. Accelerating atmospheric dryness in the decades ahead will impair carbon storage and societal-economic services.
| S-EPMC10616230 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Climate change affects ecosystem functioning directly through impacts on plant physiology, resulting in changes of global productivity. However, climate change has also an indirect impact on ecosystems, through changes in the composition and diversity of plant communities. The relative importance of these direct and indirect effects has not been evaluated within a same generic approach yet. Here we took advantage of a novel approach for disentangling these two effects in European temperate forests across a large climatic gradient, through a large simulation-based study using a forest succession model. We first showed that if productivity positively correlates with realized tree species richness under a changed climate, indirect effects appear pivotal to understand the magnitude of climate change impacts on forest productivity. We further detailed how warmer and drier conditions may affect the diversity-productivity relationships (DPRs) of temperate forests in the long term, mostly through effects on species recruitment, ultimately enhancing or preventing complementarity in resource use. Furthermore, losing key species reduced the strength of DPRs more severely in environments that are becoming climatically harsher. By disentangling direct and indirect effects of climate change on ecosystem functioning, these findings explain why high-diversity forests are expected to be more resilient to climate change.
| S-EPMC5884854 | biostudies-other
Project description:According to apparent competition theory, sharing a predator should cause indirect interactions among prey that can affect the structure and the dynamics of natural communities. Though shifts in prey dominance and predator resource use along environmental gradients are rather common, empirical evidence on the role of indirect prey-prey interactions through shared predation particularly with increasing productivity, is still scarce. In an 8-week lake mesocosm experiment, we manipulated both the addition of inorganic nutrients and the presence of generalist fish predators (crucian carp, Carassius carassius L.), to test for the effects of indirect interactions through shared predation along a productivity gradient. We found that apparent mutualism (indirect positive interaction) between benthic and pelagic prey strongly affected short-term responses of aquatic food webs to increasing productivity in the presence of a generalist fish. Increasing productivity favoured the relative abundance of benthic prey, following trends in natural productive lake systems. This led to a shift in fish selectivity from pelagic to benthic prey driven by changes in fish behaviour, which resulted in apparent mutualism due to the lower and delayed top-down control of pelagic prey at increasing productivity. Our results show empirical evidence that the coupling of multiple production pathways can lead to strong indirect interactions through shared predation, whereby prey dynamics on short time-scales are highly dependent on the foraging behaviour of generalist predators. This mechanism may play an important role in short-term responses of food webs across environmental gradients.
| S-EPMC8048462 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Future climates are forecast to include greater precipitation variability and more frequent heat waves, but the degree to which the timing of climate variability impacts ecosystems is uncertain. In a temperate, humid grassland, we examined the seasonal impacts of climate variability on 27 y of grass productivity. Drought and high-intensity precipitation reduced grass productivity only during a 110-d period, whereas high temperatures reduced productivity only during 25 d in July. The effects of drought and heat waves declined over the season and had no detectable impact on grass productivity in August. If these patterns are general across ecosystems, predictions of ecosystem response to climate change will have to account not only for the magnitude of climate variability but also for its timing.
| S-EPMC3295284 | biostudies-literature
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.
| S-EPMC10133363 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Climate shifts over this century are widely expected to alter the structure and functioning of temperate plant communities. However, long-term climate experiments in natural vegetation are rare and largely confined to systems with the capacity for rapid compositional change. In unproductive, grazed grassland at Buxton in northern England (U.K.), one of the longest running experimental manipulations of temperature and rainfall reveals vegetation highly resistant to climate shifts maintained over 13 yr. Here we document this resistance in the form of: (i) constancy in the relative abundance of growth forms and maintained dominance by long-lived, slow-growing grasses, sedges, and small forbs; (ii) immediate but minor shifts in the abundance of several species that have remained stable over the course of the experiment; (iii) no change in productivity in response to climate treatments with the exception of reduction from chronic summer drought; and (iv) only minor species losses in response to drought and winter heating. Overall, compositional changes induced by 13-yr exposure to climate regime change were less than short-term fluctuations in species abundances driven by interannual climate fluctuations. The lack of progressive compositional change, coupled with the long-term historical persistence of unproductive grasslands in northern England, suggests the community at Buxton possesses a stabilizing capacity that leads to long-term persistence of dominant species. Unproductive ecosystems provide a refuge for many threatened plants and animals and perform a diversity of ecosystem services. Our results support the view that changing land use and overexploitation rather than climate change per se constitute the primary threats to these fragile ecosystems.
| S-EPMC2481365 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A common pattern emerging from studies on the relationship between plant diversity and ecosystem functioning is that productivity increases with diversity. Most of these studies have been carried out in perennial grasslands, but many lasted only two growing seasons or reported data from a single year. Especially for perennial plant communities, however, the long-term effects of diversity are important. The question whether interactions between few species or among many species lead to increased productivity remained largely unanswered. So far, the main mechanism addressed is the increased input of nitrogen by nitrogen-fixing legumes. We report that other mechanisms can also generate strong increases of productivity with diversity. Results from 4 consecutive years of a plant diversity experiment without legumes show that a positive relationship between plant species richness and productivity emerged in the second year and strengthened with time. We show that increased nutrient use efficiency at high species richness is an important underlying mechanism. This mechanism had not been discussed in earlier studies. Furthermore, our results suggest that complementary nutrient uptake in space and time is important. Together, these mechanisms sustain consistently high productivity at high diversity.
| S-EPMC545547 | biostudies-other
Project description:Numerous studies have demonstrated that biodiversity drives ecosystem functioning, yet how biodiversity loss alters ecosystems functioning and stability in the long-term lacks experimental evidence. We report temporal effects of species richness on community productivity, stability, species asynchrony, and complementarity, and how the relationships among them change over 17 years in a grassland biodiversity experiment. Productivity declined more rapidly in less diverse communities resulting in temporally strengthening positive effects of richness on productivity, complementarity, and stability. In later years asynchrony played a more important role in increasing community stability as the negative effect of richness on population stability diminished. Only during later years did species complementarity relate to species asynchrony. These results show that species complementarity and asynchrony can take more than a decade to develop strong stabilizing effects on ecosystem functioning in diverse plant communities. Thus, the mechanisms stabilizing ecosystem functioning change with community age.
| S-EPMC9751076 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background and aimsNitrogen (N) enrichment usually weakens the stabilizing effect of biodiversity on productivity. However, previous studies focused on plant species richness and thus largely ignored the potential contributions of plant functional traits to stability, even though evidence is increasing that functional traits are stronger predictors than species richness of ecosystem functions.MethodsWe conducted a common garden experiment manipulating plant species richness and N addition levels to quantify effects of N addition on relations between species richness and functional trait identity and diversity underpinning the 'fast-slow' economics spectrum and community stability.ResultsNitrogen addition had a minor effect on community stability but increased the positive effects of species richness on community stability. Increasing community stability was found in the species-rich communities dominated by fast species due to substantially increasing temporal mean productivity relative to its standard deviation. Furthermore, enhancement in 'fast-slow' functional diversity in species-rich communities dominated by fast species under N addition increased species asynchrony, resulting in a robust biodiversity-stability relationship under N addition the artificial grassland communities.ConclusionThe findings demonstrate mechanistic links between plant species richness, 'fast-slow' functional traits, and community stability under N addition, suggesting that dynamics of biodiversity-stability relations under global changes are the results of species-specific responses of 'fast-slow' traits on the plant economics spectrum.
| S-EPMC10694273 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Savanna grasslands are characterized by high spatial heterogeneity in vegetation structure, aboveground biomass and nutritional quality, with high quality short-grass grazing lawns forming mosaics with patches of tall bunch grasses of lower quality. This heterogeneity can arise because of local differences in consumption, because of differences in productivity, or because both processes enforce each other (more production and consumption). However, the relative importance of both processes in maintaining mosaics of lawn and bunch grassland types has not been measured. Also their interplay been not been assessed across landscape gradients. In a South African savanna, we, therefore, measured the seasonal changes in primary production, nutritional quality and herbivore consumption (amount and percentage) of grazing lawns and adjacent bunch grass patches across a rainfall gradient. We found both higher amounts of primary production and, to a smaller extent, consumption for bunch grass patches. In addition, for bunch grasses primary production increased towards higher rainfall while foliar nitrogen concentrations decreased. Foliar nitrogen concentrations of lawn grasses decreased much less with increasing rainfall. Consequently, large herbivores targeted the biomass produced on grazing lawns with on average 75 % of the produced biomass consumed. We conclude that heterogeneity in vegetation structure in this savanna ecosystem is better explained by small-scale differences in productivity between lawn and bunch grass vegetation types than by local differences in consumption rates. Nevertheless, the high nutritional quality of grazing lawns is highly attractive and, therefore, important for the maintenance of the heterogeneity in species composition (i.e. grazing lawn maintenance).
| S-EPMC5042998 | biostudies-literature