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Abstract Plants must respond to changing climatic conditions while continuing to defend against herbivores. While numerous studies have investigated how one type of stress affects plants, the effects of multiple abiotic and biotic stressors and their interactions are less understood. We used the Rainfall Exclusion eXperiment (REX) at the Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research site (KBS LTER) to quantify the individual and interactive effects of drought and warming treatments (abiotic stressors), and galling byRhopalomyia solidaginis(biotic stress) on tall goldenrod (Solidago altissima), a common native plant species in Michigan, USA. At the end of the 2021 and 2022 growing seasons, we measured stem height and biomass as a proxy for plant productivity, and seed mass per stem as a proxy for reproductive fitness. We also measured gall biomass, larval chamber number, and larval chamber volume to reflect the effects of drought and warming on the gallmaker. We found that warming mitigated some negative galling effects; galled plants were 7.1 cm shorter than non-galled plants in ambient conditions, but under warming, there was no reduction in height for galled plants. Furthermore, drought exacerbated some galling effects: galled plants experiencing drought conditions had the lowest probability of producing seeds (0.47) compared to plants from all other treatments. Understanding how plants respond to individual abiotic and biotic stressors as well as their interactions will enhance our ability to predict plant fitness and community dynamics under new climate regimes. 

These data and R scripts are from a study of climate change impacts on galling in goldenrod (Solidago altissima), at Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research (KBS LTER) site, Hickory Corners, Michigan, USA during the summers of 2021-2022 (REX 2024). This study set is part of the KBS LTER Rainfall Exclusion eXperiment (REX). Goldenrod plants with and without galls caused by Rhopalomyia solidaginis were exposed to warmed, drought, and warmed x drought treatments, and ambient (no treatment) and irrigated control conditions. Warming was achieved by use of open-top chambers for tall-stature plant communities (Welshofer et al. 2018 MEE) and a 6-week drought was implemented by use of rain-out shelters (Kahmark et al. 2024 Zenodo). L0 data are available upon request; they include the raw data from the KBS LTER REX project. The scripts that are used to clean L0 data and produce L1 data are also available upon request. The L1 data are the result of merged L0 data and are cleaned for typos and use standardized names. L1 data contain plant and gall traits from all treatments. The L2 scripts use the L1 data for statistical analyses and to create figures. Literature cited: Kahmark, K., Jones, M., Bohm, S., Baker, N., & Robertson, G. P. (2024). Rainfall manipulation shelters for agricultural research. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10607631. Rain Exclusion eXperiment (REX). (2024). https://lter.kbs.msu.edu/research/rainfall-exclusion-experiment/. https://lter.kbs.msu.edu/research/rainfall-exclusion-experiment/. Welshofer KB, Zarnetske PL, Lany NK, Thompson LAE (2018) Open-top chambers for temperature manipulation in taller-stature plant communities. Methods Ecol Evol 9:254–259. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12863. 

{"Abstract":["The data in this package is associated with the analysis for a manuscript titled\n "Multiple community properties drive ecosystem resistance and resilience to extreme climate\n events across mesic grasslands". The files include compiled data on plant biomass production,\n species abundance, experimental treatments, extreme climate event values, and calculated\n diversity and stability measures from grassland plots in experiments at CDR, KBS, and KNZ LTER\n sites."]} 

Abstract Anthropogenic climate warming affects plant communities by changing community structure and function. Studies on climate warming have primarily focused on individual effects of warming, but the interactive effects of warming with biotic factors could be at least as important in community responses to climate change. In addition, climate change experiments spanning multiple years are necessary to capture interannual variability and detect the influence of these effects within ecological communities. Our study explores the individual and interactive effects of warming and insect herbivory on plant traits and community responses within a 7‐year warming and herbivory manipulation experiment in two early successional plant communities in Michigan, USA. We find stronger support for the individual effects of both warming and herbivory on multiple plant morphological and phenological traits; only the timing of plant green‐up and seed set demonstrated an interactive effect between warming and herbivory. With herbivory, warming advanced green‐up, but with reduced herbivory, there was no significant effect of warming. In contrast, warming increased plant biomass, but the effect of warming on biomass did not depend upon the level of insect herbivores. We found that these treatments had stronger effects in some years than others, highlighting the need for multiyear experiments. This study demonstrates that warming and herbivory can have strong direct effects on plant communities, but that their interactive effects are limited in these early successional systems. Because the strength and direction of these effects can vary by ecological context, it is still advisable to include levels of biotic interactions, multiple traits and years, and community type when studying climate change effects on plants and their communities. 

ABSTRACT Ecosystem resistance and resilience to extreme climate events is impacted by community properties, including biodiversity. However, the relative importance of species richness, evenness and dominance is debated and is further modulated by global change factors such as nutrient addition. Using nearly 40 years of data from naturally‐assembled plant communities at three Long‐Term Ecological Research sites, we found that while species richness is important for resistance to extreme dry events, dominance is important for resistance to extreme wet events and evenness is important for resilience under ambient (unfertilized) conditions. Furthermore, nutrient addition alters resistance and resilience indirectly by reducing species richness and increasing dominance. Species richness and dominance are also directly reduced by extreme climate events, which may erode resistance and resilience to future events. Our results show that species richness, dominance and evenness shape ecosystem stability under climate extremes and that fertilization fundamentally modifies biodiversity–stability relationships in mesic grasslands.