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Abstract Nutrient availability and grazing are known as main drivers of grassland plant diversity, and increased nutrient availability and long‐term cessation of grazing often decrease local‐scale plant diversity. Experimental tests of mechanisms determining plant diversity focus mainly on vascular plants (VP), whereas non‐vascular plants (NVP, here bryophytes) have been ignored. It is therefore not known how the current models based on VPs predict the rates of total (NVP + VP) losses in plant diversity.Here we used plant community data, including VPs and NVPs, from nine sites in Europe and North America and belonging to the Nutrient Network experiment, to test whether neglecting NVPs leads to biased estimates of plant diversity loss rates. The plant communities were subjected to factorial addition of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium with micronutrients (K_+μ), as well as a grazing exclusion combined with multi‐nutrient fertilization (NPK_+μ) treatment.We found that nutrient additions reduced both NVP and VP species richness, but the effects on NVP species richness were on average stronger than on VPs: NVP species richness decreased 67%, while VP species richness decreased 28%, causing their combined richness to decrease 38% in response to multi‐nutrient (NPK_+μ) fertilization. Thus, VP diversity alone underestimated total plant diversity loss by 10 percentage points.Although NVP and VP species diversities similarly declined in response to N and NPK_+μfertilizations, the evenness of NVPs increased and that of VPs remained unchanged. NP, NPK_+μfertilization and NPK_+μfertilization combined with grazing exclusion, associated with decreasing light availability at ground level, led to the strongest loss of NVP species or probability of NVP presence. However, grazing did not generally mitigate the fertilization effects.Synthesis. In nine grassland sites in Europe and North America, nutrient addition caused a larger relative decline in non‐vascular plant (NVP) than vascular plant species richness. Hence, not accounting for NVPs can lead to underestimation of losses in plant diversity in response to continued nutrient pollution of grasslands. 

Abstract Eutrophication is a widespread environmental change that usually reduces the stabilizing effect of plant diversity on productivity in local communities. Whether this effect is scale dependent remains to be elucidated. Here, we determine the relationship between plant diversity and temporal stability of productivity for 243 plant communities from 42 grasslands across the globe and quantify the effect of chronic fertilization on these relationships. Unfertilized local communities with more plant species exhibit greater asynchronous dynamics among species in response to natural environmental fluctuations, resulting in greater local stability (alpha stability). Moreover, neighborhood communities that have greater spatial variation in plant species composition within sites (higher beta diversity) have greater spatial asynchrony of productivity among communities, resulting in greater stability at the larger scale (gamma stability). Importantly, fertilization consistently weakens the contribution of plant diversity to both of these stabilizing mechanisms, thus diminishing the positive effect of biodiversity on stability at differing spatial scales. Our findings suggest that preserving grassland functional stability requires conservation of plant diversity within and among ecological communities.