Dataset Information

Two potential equilibrium states in long-term soil respiration activity of dry grasslands are maintained by local topographic features.

ABSTRACT: Soil respiration of grasslands is spatio-temporally variable reflecting the changing biological activities of the soil. In our study we analysed how the long-term soil respiration activities of dry grasslands would perform in terms of resistance and resilience. We also investigated how terrain features are responsible for response stability. We conducted a 7-year-long spatial study in a Hungarian dry grassland, measuring soil respiration (R_s), soil temperature (T_s) and soil water content (SWC) along 15 measuring campaigns in 80?×?60 m grids and soil organic carbon content in 6 of the occasions. Two proxy variables were introduced to grasp the overall R_s activity, as well as its temporal stability: average rankR_s, the temporal average R_s rank of a measuring position from the campaigns revealed the persistent spatial pattern of R_s, while rangeR_s, the range of ranks of the positions from the campaigns described the amplitude of the R_s response in time, referring to the response stability in terms of resistance or resilience. We formulated a hypothetic concept of a two-state equilibrium to describe the performance of the long-term R_s activity: R_s activity with smaller rangeR_s, that is both the lower elevation positions with larger rankR_s ("state I") and the higher elevation positions with smaller rankR_s ("state II") correspond to an equilibrium state with several terrain attributes being responsible for the equilibrium responses. Majority of the measuring positions was belonging to none of these equilibrium states. These positions showed higher rangeR_s for medium rankR_s, suggesting resilience (not resistance) as a major strategy for this ecosystem.

SUBMITTER: Foti S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7459112 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Two potential equilibrium states in long-term soil respiration activity of dry grasslands are maintained by local topographic features.

Fóti Szilvia S Balogh János J Gecse Bernadett B Pintér Krisztina K Papp Marianna M Koncz Péter P Kardos Levente L Mónok Dávid D Nagy Zoltán Z

Scientific reports 20200831 1

Soil respiration of grasslands is spatio-temporally variable reflecting the changing biological activities of the soil. In our study we analysed how the long-term soil respiration activities of dry grasslands would perform in terms of resistance and resilience. We also investigated how terrain features are responsible for response stability. We conducted a 7-year-long spatial study in a Hungarian dry grassland, measuring soil respiration (R<sub>s</sub>), soil temperature (T<sub>s</sub>) and soil ...[more]

PMID: 32868831

Similar Datasets

Project description:One of the few laws in ecology is that communities consist of few common and many rare taxa. Functional traits may help to identify the underlying mechanisms of this community pattern, since they correlate with different niche dimensions. However, comprehensive studies are missing that investigate the effects of species mean traits (niche position) and intraspecific trait variability (ITV, niche width) on species abundance. In this study, we investigated fragmented dry grasslands to reveal trait-occurrence relationships in plants at local and regional scales. We predicted that (a) at the local scale, species occurrence is highest for species with intermediate traits, (b) at the regional scale, habitat specialists have a lower species occurrence than generalists, and thus, traits associated with stress-tolerance have a negative effect on species occurrence, and (c) ITV increases species occurrence irrespective of the scale. We measured three plant functional traits (SLA = specific leaf area, LDMC = leaf dry matter content, plant height) at 21 local dry grassland communities (10 m × 10 m) and analyzed the effect of these traits and their variation on species occurrence. At the local scale, mean LDMC had a positive effect on species occurrence, indicating that stress-tolerant species are the most abundant rather than species with intermediate traits (hypothesis 1). We found limited support for lower specialist occurrence at the regional scale (hypothesis 2). Further, ITV of LDMC and plant height had a positive effect on local occurrence supporting hypothesis 3. In contrast, at the regional scale, plants with a higher ITV of plant height were less frequent. We found no evidence that the consideration of phylogenetic relationships in our analyses influenced our findings. In conclusion, both species mean traits (in particular LDMC) and ITV were differently related to species occurrence with respect to spatial scale. Therefore, our study underlines the strong scale-dependency of trait-abundance relationships.

Dataset Information

Two potential equilibrium states in long-term soil respiration activity of dry grasslands are maintained by local topographic features.

Publications

Two potential equilibrium states in long-term soil respiration activity of dry grasslands are maintained by local topographic features.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets