Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 112, Issue 42, Pages 13009-13014Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1508170112
Keywords
biodiversity; climate change; resource colimitation; functional traits; low-productivity ecosystems
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Funding
- Academy of Finland [253385]
- Wihuri foundation
- National Science Foundation [DEB-1111716]
- Academy of Finland (AKA) [253385, 253385] Funding Source: Academy of Finland (AKA)
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Ecological theory and evidence suggest that plant community biomass and composition may often be jointly controlled by climatic water availability and soil nutrient supply. To the extent that such colimitation operates, alterations in water availability caused by climatic change may have relatively little effect on plant communities on nutrient-poor soils. We tested this prediction with a 5-y rainfall and nutrient manipulation in a semiarid annual grassland system with highly heterogeneous soil nutrient supplies. On nutrient-poor soils, rainfall addition alone had little impact, but rainfall and nutrient addition synergized to cause large increases in biomass, declines in diversity, and near-complete species turnover. Plant species with resource-conservative functional traits (low specific leaf area, short stature) were replaced by species with resource-acquisitive functional traits (high specific leaf area, tall stature). On nutrient-rich soils, in contrast, rainfall addition alone caused substantial increases in biomass, whereas fertilization had little effect. Our results highlight that multiple resource limitation is a critical aspect when predicting the relative vulnerability of natural communities to climatically induced compositional change and diversity loss.
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