In an era of anthropogenically altered disturbance regimes and increased nutrient loads, understanding how communities respond to these perturbations is essential for successful habitat restoration. Disturbance and resource supply can affect community diversity by altering community assembly processes, such as recruitment, mortality or competitive inequalities. The mechanisms behind community responses to these drivers will differentially affect multiple facets of diversity. Here we examine how factorial manipulations of disturbance (raking to remove above‐ground vegetation) and nitrogen supply affect taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity of predominantly annual California grassland communities spanning a 500‐km latitudinal and twofold rainfall gradient. The disturbance caused density‐independent biomass removal and increased access to resources such as space and light, thus mimicking demographic effects of disturbance as considered in ecological models and broadly applicable to empirical systems. We used paired metrics of richness, evenness and community composition to compare evidence from taxonomy and phylogeny. Disturbance increased species and phylogenetic diversity (richness and evenness metrics). However, nitrogen addition interacted with disturbance to reduce species richness and phylogenetic diversity. Undisturbed communities were more strongly clustered phylogenetically, but disturbance eroded this clustering such that communities became more random (i.e. indistinguishable from a null model of assembly). Species composition differed between disturbed and undisturbed communities, and many species were observed in only one community type. Disturbance interacted with nitrogen supply to alter phylogenetic composition of communities, and recently disturbed communities were more spatially variable in phylogenetic composition than undisturbed communities. Phylogenetic composition of communities also differed among nitrogen treatments.
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Eutrophication usually impacts grassland biodiversity, community composition, and biomass production, but its impact on the stability of these community aspects is unclear. One challenge is that stability has many facets that can be tightly correlated (low dimensionality) or highly disparate (high dimensionality). Using standardized experiments in 55 grassland sites from a globally distributed experiment (NutNet), we quantify the effects of nutrient addition on five facets of stability (temporal invariability, resistance during dry and wet growing seasons, recovery after dry and wet growing seasons), measured on three community aspects (aboveground biomass, community composition, and species richness). Nutrient addition reduces the temporal invariability and resistance of species richness and community composition during dry and wet growing seasons, but does not affect those of biomass. Different stability measures are largely uncorrelated under both ambient and eutrophic conditions, indicating consistently high dimensionality. Harnessing the dimensionality of ecological stability provides insights for predicting grassland responses to global environmental change.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1831944
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10478444
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Nature
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Synthesis. Our results suggest that disturbing these grassland communities by removing above‐ground vegetation increased community diversity by increasing recruitment. Seed addition following this type of disturbance is thus likely to be an effective restoration technique. However, we have shown that disturbance combined with nitrogen enrichment reduces community diversity. The mechanism for this enrichment effect does not appear to be linked to increased productivity leading to light limitation. This work suggests restoration efforts employing biomass removal must take nutrient availability into account to maximize local community diversity. -
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