Climate warming reduces the temporal stability of plant community biomass production

Ma, Zhijun; Liu, Huiying; Mi, Zhaorong; Zhang, Zhenhua; Wang, Yonghui; Xu, Wanjin; Jiang, Lin; He, Jin‐Sheng

doi:10.1038/ncomms15378

Cited by 344 publications

(375 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…Notably, studies carried out in the same experiment revealed that the biomass of grasses was improved by increased precipitation and biomass of legume was enhanced by warming (Ma et al. , Xu et al. ), both results that might be induced by earlier phenology.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

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Plant phenological sensitivity to climate change on the Tibetan Plateau and relative to other areas of the world

et al. 2019

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Citation: Suonan, J., A. T. Classen, N. J. Sanders, and J.-S. He. 2019. Plant phenological sensitivity to climate change on the Tibetan Plateau and relative to other areas of the world.Abstract. Global warming and changes in precipitation are altering the phenology of plants that significantly impact the functioning and services of ecosystems. Although a number of studies have addressed responses of plant phenology to warming and altered precipitation individually, their interactions can alter plant phenology differently than either does independently. To explore how the interactions between global change drivers alter alpine ecosystems, we conducted a factorial experiment manipulating warming (ambient and +2°C) and altered precipitation (50% decrease, control, and 50% increase) simultaneously in an alpine meadow on the Tibetan Plateau. Over two years, we monitored plant phenological events, leafout day and first flowering day, for 11 common plant species that account for 74.4% of the total above biomass. Surprisingly, there was no interaction between warming and changes in precipitation on community plant phenology, but warming advanced leaf-out and first flowering day by 7.10 and 9.79 d, respectively. Unlike the community response, plant functional groups had a variety of direct and interactive responses to the experimental climate drivers. While the phenology of legumes was most influenced by temperature, temperature and precipitation interacted to alter the phenology of grasses and forbs. To explore how plant phenological sensitivity on the Tibetan Plateau is compared with other meadow ecosystems, we combined our dataset with a global plant phenology dataset. Interestingly, the phenological sensitivity of leaf-out day and first flowering day on the Tibetan Plateau is 7.3 and 37.8 times greater than global phenological sensitivity, respectively. This result highlights that a meta-analysis of global phenological sensitivity may significantly underestimate change in some regions-even regions as large as the Tibetan Plateau. Together, our results suggest that the Tibetan Plateau may experience rapid change as temperatures warm and that these changes will likely be more rapid than in other regions of the world. Further, our study highlights that if we are to make accurate predictions of how plant phenology may change with warming, we need to understand the specific environmental cues that drive phenological responses across different areas.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…We established a multifactor warming × precipitation experiment in July 2011 (for details of the experimental setup, see Ma et al. , Suonan et al. , Liu et al.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plant phenological sensitivity to climate change on the Tibetan Plateau and relative to other areas of the world

et al. 2019

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“…More broadly, vegetation response to urbanization could provide the insight into the long‐term effects and interactions of multiple global‐change drivers and adaptation strategy by plants. Current manipulative experiments rely on micro‐ to plot‐scale facilities to manipulate one or more factors at a time to monitor the plant responses (Bagley et al., ; Dieleman et al., ; Kupper et al., ; Löw et al., ; Ma et al., ; Nunn et al., ). In addition, manipulative experiments usually employ abrupt changes of variables (e.g., 50% precipitation reduction, doubling of CO 2 ) rather than gradual changes, which might result in instantaneous and pulsatile plant responses (Zhao et al., ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vegetation growth enhancement in urban environments of the Conterminous United States

Jia

Zhao

Liu

2018

Global Change Biology

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Cities are natural laboratories for studying vegetation responses to global environmental changes because of their climate, atmospheric, and biogeochemical conditions. However, few holistic studies have been conducted on the impact of urbanization on vegetation growth. We decomposed the overall impacts of urbanization on vegetation growth into direct (replacement of original land surfaces by impervious built-up) and indirect (urban environments) components, using a conceptual framework and remotely sensed data for 377 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the conterminous United States (CONUS) in 2001, 2006, and 2011. Results showed that urban pixels are often greener than expected given the amount of paved surface they contain. The vegetation growth enhancement due to indirect effects occurred in 88.4%, 90.8%, and 92.9% of urban bins in 2001, 2006, and 2011, respectively. By defining offset value as the ratio of the absolute indirect and direct impact, we obtained that growth enhancement due to indirect effects compensated for about 29.2%, 29.5%, and 31.0% of the reduced productivity due to loss of vegetated surface area on average in 2001, 2006, and 2011, respectively. Vegetation growth responses to urbanization showed little temporal variation but large regional differences with higher offset value in the western CONUS than in the eastern CONUS. Our study highlights the prevalence of vegetation growth enhancement in urban environments and the necessity of differentiating various impacts of urbanization on vegetation growth, and calls for tailored field experiments to understand the relative contributions of various driving forces to vegetation growth and predict vegetation responses to future global change using cities as harbingers.

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“…Ecologically, the impacts of drought are likely to be intensified by the joint effects of higher temperatures and less rainfall on ecosystem processes (e.g. Ma et al., ), and by the delivery of rainfall in irregular, extreme events that may increasingly fail to coincide with ecological demand (Collins et al., ; Wang, Yoon, Becker, & Gillies, ). Against this background, resilience of ecological systems to heightened variability in climatic water supply is an urgent issue demanding increased theoretical and empirical attention (Ogle et al., ; Reyer et al., ; Seddon, Macias‐Fauria, Long, Benz, & Willis, ; Smith, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate‐driven diversity change in annual grasslands: Drought plus deluge does not equal normal

Harrison

LaForgia

Latimer

2018

Global Change Biology

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Climate forecasts agree that increased variability and extremes will tend to reduce the availability of water in many terrestrial ecosystems. Increasingly severe droughts may be exacerbated both by warmer temperatures and by the relative unavailability of water that arrives in more sporadic and intense rainfall events. Using long-term data and an experimental water manipulation, we examined the resilience of a heterogeneous annual grassland community to a prolonged series of dry winters that led to a decline in plant species richness (2000-2014), followed by a near-record wet winter (2016-2017), a climatic sequence that broadly resembles the predicted future in its high variability. In our 80, 5-m observational plots, species richness did not recover in response to the wet winter, and the positive relationship of richness to annual winter rainfall thus showed a significant weakening trend over the 18-year time period. In experiments on 100, 1-m plots, wintertime water supplementation increased and drought shelters decreased the seedling survival and final individual biomass of native annual forbs, the main functional group contributing to the observed long-term decline in richness. Water supplementation also increased the total cover of native annual forbs, but only increased richness within nested subplots to which seeds were also added. We conclude that prolonged dry winters, by increasing seedling mortality and reducing growth of native forbs, may have diminished the seedbank and thus the recovery potential of diversity in this community. However, the wet winter and the watering treatment did cause recovery of the community mean values of a key functional trait (specific leaf area, an indicator of drought intolerance), suggesting that some aggregate community properties may be stabilized by functional redundancy among species.

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Climate warming reduces the temporal stability of plant community biomass production

Cited by 344 publications

References 68 publications

Plant phenological sensitivity to climate change on the Tibetan Plateau and relative to other areas of the world

Plant phenological sensitivity to climate change on the Tibetan Plateau and relative to other areas of the world

Vegetation growth enhancement in urban environments of the Conterminous United States

Climate‐driven diversity change in annual grasslands: Drought plus deluge does not equal normal

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