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Biodiversity experiments have shown that species loss reduces ecosystem functioning in grassland. To test whether this result can be extrapolated to forests, the main contributors to terrestrial primary productivity, requires large-scale experiments. We manipulated tree species richness by planting more than 150,000 trees in plots with 1 to 16 species. Simulating multiple extinction scenarios, we found that richness strongly increased stand-level productivity. After 8 years, 16-species mixtures had accumulated over twice the amount of carbon found in average monocultures and similar amounts as those of two commercial monocultures. Species richness effects were strongly associated with functional and phylogenetic diversity. A shrub addition treatment reduced tree productivity, but this reduction was smaller at high shrub species richness. Our results encourage multispecies afforestation strategies to restore biodiversity and mitigate climate change.

The long-term stressful utilization of forests and grasslands has led to ecosystem degradation and C loss. Since the late 1970s China has launched six key national ecological restoration projects to protect its environment and restore degraded ecosystems. Here, we conducted a large-scale field investigation and a literature survey of biomass and soil C in China's forest, shrubland, and grassland ecosystems across the regions where the six projects were implemented (∼16% of the country's land area). We investigated the changes in the C stocks of these ecosystems to evaluate the contributions of the projects to the country's C sink between 2001 and 2010. Over this decade, we estimated that the total annual C sink in the project region was 132 Tg C per y (1 Tg = 10 g), over half of which (74 Tg C per y, 56%) was attributed to the implementation of the projects. Our results demonstrate that these restoration projects have substantially contributed to CO mitigation in China.

Lakes are widely distributed on the Mongolian Plateau and, as critical water sources, have sustained Mongolian pastures for hundreds of years. However, the plateau has experienced significant lake shrinkage and grassland degradation during the past several decades. To quantify the changes in all of the lakes on the plateau and the associated driving factors, we performed a satellite-based survey using multitemporal Landsat images from the 1970s to 2000s, combined with ground-based censuses. Our results document a rapid loss of lakes on the plateau in the past decades: the number of lakes with a water surface area >1 km 2 decreased from 785 in the late 1980s to 577 in 2010, with a greater rate of decrease (34.0%) in Inner Mongolia of China than in Mongolia (17.6%). This decrease has been particularly pronounced since the late 1990s in Inner Mongolia and the number of lakes >10 km 2 has declined by 30.0%. The statistical analyses suggested that in Mongolia precipitation was the dominant driver for the lake changes, and in Inner Mongolia coal mining was most important in its grassland area and irrigation was the leading factor in its cultivated area. The deterioration of lakes is expected to continue in the following decades not only because of changing climate but also increasing exploitation of underground mineral and groundwater resources on the plateau. To protect grasslands and the indigenous nomads, effective action is urgently required to save these valuable lakes from further deterioration.Mongolia | lake shrinkage | mining | irrigation | climate change

Despite evidence from experimental grasslands that plant diversity increases biomass production and soil organic carbon (SOC) storage, it remains unclear whether this is true in natural ecosystems, especially under climatic variations and human disturbances. Based on field observations from 6,098 forest, shrubland, and grassland sites across China and predictions from an integrative model combining multiple theories, we systematically examined the direct effects of climate, soils, and human impacts on SOC storage versus the indirect effects mediated by species richness (SR), aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP), and belowground biomass (BB). We found that favorable climates (high temperature and precipitation) had a consistent negative effect on SOC storage in forests and shrublands, but not in grasslands. Climate favorability, particularly high precipitation, was associated with both higher SR and higher BB, which had consistent positive effects on SOC storage, thus offsetting the direct negative effect of favorable climate on SOC. The indirect effects of climate on SOC storage depended on the relationships of SR with ANPP and BB, which were consistently positive in all biome types. In addition, human disturbance and soil pH had both direct and indirect effects on SOC storage, with the indirect effects mediated by changes in SR, ANPP, and BB. High soil pH had a consistently negative effect on SOC storage. Our findings have important implications for improving global carbon cycling models and ecosystem management: Maintaining high levels of diversity can enhance soil carbon sequestration and help sustain the benefits of plant diversity and productivity.

China's terrestrial ecosystems have functioned as important carbon sinks. However, previous estimates of carbon budgets have included large uncertainties owing to the limitations of sample size, multiple data sources, and inconsistent methodologies. In this study, we conducted an intensive field campaign involving 14,371 field plots to investigate all sectors of carbon stocks in China's forests, shrublands, grasslands, and croplands to better estimate the regional and national carbon pools and to explore the biogeographical patterns and potential drivers of these pools. The total carbon pool in these four ecosystems was 79.24 ± 2.42 Pg C, of which 82.9% was stored in soil (to a depth of 1 m), 16.5% in biomass, and 0.60% in litter. Forests, shrublands, grasslands, and croplands contained 30.83 ± 1.57 Pg C, 6.69 ± 0.32 Pg C, 25.40 ± 1.49 Pg C, and 16.32 ± 0.41 Pg C, respectively. When all terrestrial ecosystems are taken into account, the country's total carbon pool is 89.27 ± 1.05 Pg C. The carbon density of the forests, shrublands, and grasslands exhibited a strong correlation with climate: it decreased with increasing temperature but increased with increasing precipitation. Our analysis also suggests a significant sequestration potential of 1.9-3.4 Pg C in forest biomass in the next 10-20 years assuming no removals, mainly because of forest growth. Our results update the estimates of carbon pools in China's terrestrial ecosystems based on direct field measurements, and these estimates are essential to the validation and parameterization of carbon models in China and globally.

The increase of biodiversity from poles to equator is one of the most pervasive features of nature. For 2 centuries since von Humboldt, Wallace, and Darwin, biogeographers and ecologists have investigated the environmental and historical factors that determine the latitudinal gradient of species diversity, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. The recently proposed metabolic theory of ecology (MTE) aims to explain ecological patterns and processes, including geographical patterns of species richness, in terms of the effects of temperature and body size on the metabolism of organisms. Here we use 2 comparable databases of tree distributions in eastern Asia and North America to investigate the roles of environmental temperature and spatial scale in shaping geographical patterns of species diversity. We find that number of species increases exponentially with environmental temperature as predicted by the MTE, and so does the rate of spatial turnover in species composition (slope of the species-area relationship). The magnitude of temperature dependence of species richness increases with spatial scale. Moreover, the relationship between species richness and temperature is much steeper in eastern Asia than in North America: in cold climates at high latitudes there are more tree species in North America, but the reverse is true in warmer climates at lower latitudes. These patterns provide evidence that the kinetics of ecological and evolutionary processes play a major role in the latitudinal pattern of biodiversity.biodiversity ͉ metabolic theory of ecology ͉ species richness ͉ kinetic energy ͉ species-area relationship

What determines large-scale patterns of species richness remains one of the most controversial issues in ecology. Using the distribution maps of 11 405 woody species in China, we compared the effects of habitat heterogeneity, human activities and different aspects of climate, particularly environmental energy, waterenergy dynamics and winter frost, and explored how biogeographic affinities (tropical versus temperate) influence richness-climate relationships. We found that the species richness of trees, shrubs, lianas and all woody plants strongly correlated with each other, and more strongly correlated with the species richness of tropical affinity than with that of temperate affinity. The mean temperature of the coldest quarter was the strongest predictor of species richness, and its explanatory power for species richness was significantly higher for tropical affinity than for temperate affinity. These results suggest that the patterns of woody species richness mainly result from the increasing intensity of frost filtering for tropical species from the equator/lowlands towards the poles/highlands, and hence support the freezing-tolerance hypothesis. A model based on these results was developed, which explained 76-85% of species richness variation in China, and reasonably predicted the species richness of woody plants in North America and the Northern Hemisphere.