Herbivores and nutrients control grassland plant diversity via light limitation

Borer, Elizabeth T.; Seabloom, Eric W.; Gruner, Daniel S.; Harpole, W. Stanley; Hillebrand, Helmut; Lind, Eric M.; Adler, Peter B.; Alberti, Juan; Anderson, T. Michael; Bakker, Jonathan D.; Biederman, Lori A.; Blumenthal, Dana M.; Brown, Cynthia S.; Brudvig, Lars A.; Buckley, Yvonne M.; Cadotte, Marc W.; Chu, Chengjin; Cleland, Elsa E.; Crawley, Michael J.; Daleo, Pedro; Damschen, Ellen I.; Davies, Kendi F.; DeCrappeo, Nicole M.; Du, Guozhen; Firn, Jennifer; Hautier, Yann; Heckman, Robert W.; Héctor, Andy; HilleRisLambers, Janneke; Iribarne, Oscar; Klein, Julia A.; Knops, Johannes M. H.; Pierre, Kimberly J. La; Leakey, Andrew D. B.; Li, Wei; MacDougall, Andrew S.; McCulley, Rebecca L.; Melbourne, Brett A.; Mitchell, Charles E.; Moore, Joslin L.; Mortensen, Brent; O’Halloran, Lydia R.; Orrock, John L.; Pascual, Jesús; Prober, Suzanne M.; Pyke, David A.; Risch, Anita C.; Schuetz, Martin; Smith, Melinda D.; Stevens, Carly J.; Sullivan, Lauren K.; Williams, Ryan J.; Wragg, Peter D.; Wright, Justin P.; Yang, Louie H.

doi:10.1038/nature13144

Cited by 675 publications

(813 citation statements)

References 29 publications

(73 reference statements)

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“…However, mechanistic linkages with multiple stressors have been needed to accurately describe potential effects of global change, which are typically multivariate in nature (i.e., simultaneous alterations to resource, consumers, and spatial dynamics). Most studies have focused on alterations either to spatial dynamics (Tscharntke et al 2012;Rösch et al 2013;Damschen et al 2014) or to resource and consumers via resourcebased processes such as eutrophication (Haddad et al 2000;Borer et al 2014) and/or climate-based processes such as increased temperature (Shurin et al 2012;Sentis et al 2014). However, landscape fragmentation is likely to occur in already altered habitats, with the potential for synergetic effects among these multiple stressors (Brook et al 2008).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These effects are especially acute for insect herbivores, which influence numerous ecological and evolutionary processes, including functional attributes relating to plant production and pollination (Crawley 1989;Branson et al 2006;Schmitz 2010;Agrawal et al 2012;Silliman et al 2013;Borer et al 2014). There is widespread evidence for anthropogenic-based changes to insect herbivore communities, with signals including reduced species richness, invasion, outbreaks, and selection toward generalist feeding strategies (Tscharntke and Brandl 2004;Branson et al 2006;Clavel et al 2010;Martinson and Fagan 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Spatially Heterogeneous Perturbations Homogenize the Regulation of Insect Herbivores

Harvey

MacDougall

2015

The American Naturalist

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Anthropogenic influences on resources and consumers can affect food web regulation, with impacts on trophic structure and ecosystem processes. Identifying how these impacts unfold is challenging because alterations to one or both resources and consumers can similarly transform community structure, especially for intermediate consumers. To date, empirical testing of perturbations on trophic regulation has been limited by the difficulty in separating the direct effect of perturbations on species composition and diversity versus those unfolding indirectly via altered feeding pathways. Moreover, disentangling the independent and interactive impacts of co-varying stressors that characterize human-altered systems has been an ongoing analytical challenge. We used a large-scale meta-community experiment in grasslands to test how resource inputs, stand perturbation, and spatial factors affect regulation of insect herbivores in tri-trophic grassland food webs. Using path-model comparisons, we observed significant simplification of food web regulation on insect herbivores, shifting from mixed predator-resource regulation in unaltered mainland areas, to strictly resource-based regulation with landscape perturbation and fragmentation. Most changes were attributed to homogenization of plant community caused by landscape fragmentation and the deterministic influence of eutrophication that reduced among-patch beta-diversity. This led to a simplified food web dominated by fewer, but more abundant herbivore taxa. Our work implies that anthropogenic perturbation relating to resources and spatial isolation can transform the regulation of food web diversity, structure and function. abstract: Anthropogenic influences on resources and consumers can affect food web regulation, with impacts on trophic structure and ecosystem processes. Identifying how these impacts unfold is challenging because alterations to one or both resources and consumers can similarly transform community structure, especially for intermediate consumers. To date, empirical testing of perturbations on trophic regulation has been limited by the difficulty in separating the direct effect of perturbations on species composition and diversity from those unfolding indirectly via altered feeding pathways. Moreover, disentangling the independent and interactive impacts of covarying stressors that characterize human-altered systems has been an ongoing analytical challenge. We used a large-scale metacommunity experiment in grasslands to test how resource inputs, stand perturbation, and spatial factors affect regulation of insect herbivores in tritrophic grassland food webs. Using path-model comparisons, we observed significant simplification of food web regulation on insect herbivores, shifting from mixed predator-resource regulation in unaltered mainland areas to strictly resource-based regulation with landscape perturbation and fragmentation. Most changes were attributed to homogenization of plant community caused by landscape fragmentation and the deterministic...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatially Heterogeneous Perturbations Homogenize the Regulation of Insect Herbivores

Harvey

MacDougall

2015

The American Naturalist

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“…Nutrient enrichment experiments show that eutrophication can reduce diversity by decreasing niche dimensionality and enhancing competitive exclusion via increased light limitation [4,5,8] or other resource limitation [21]. The effects of eutrophication may be dampened by higher plant diversity and functional composition [22].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Anthropogenic eutrophication is a global problem [1,2] and leads to a myriad of effects on plant species and ecosystem properties [3][4][5]. In general, non-native species exhibit greater success than natives under increased nutrient addition [6,7], and often non-native species will increase in abundance and richness in eutrophied communities at the cost of native species [8][9][10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, nutrient addition modifies environmental conditions, changing the composition of communities and reducing species diversity [4,5,8], often causing losses of rare, native, perennial and N-fixing species [8,39]. Thus, eutrophication represents a new filter, which modifies the identity and abundance of species in communities by selecting for a different combination of rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org Phil.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Climate modifies response of non-native and native species richness to nutrient enrichment

Flores‐Moreno

Reich

Lind

et al. 2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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One contribution of 17 to a theme issue 'Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in dynamic landscapes'. School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia Ecosystem eutrophication often increases domination by non-natives and causes displacement of native taxa. However, variation in environmental conditions may affect the outcome of interactions between native and non-native taxa in environments where nutrient supply is elevated. We examined the interactive effects of eutrophication, climate variability and climate average conditions on the success of native and non-native plant species using experimental nutrient manipulations replicated at 32 grassland sites on four continents. We hypothesized that effects of nutrient addition would be greatest where climate was stable and benign, owing to reduced niche partitioning. We found that the abundance of non-native species increased with nutrient addition independent of climate; however, nutrient addition increased nonnative species richness and decreased native species richness, with these effects & 2016 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.on May 12, 2018 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/ Downloaded from dampened in warmer or wetter sites. Eutrophication also altered the time scale in which grassland invasion responded to climate, decreasing the importance of long-term climate and increasing that of annual climate. Thus, climatic conditions mediate the responses of native and non-native flora to nutrient enrichment. Our results suggest that the negative effect of nutrient addition on native abundance is decoupled from its effect on richness, and reduces the time scale of the links between climate and compositional change.

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Drivers of diversity

Eichhorn

2016

Natural Systems

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Herbivores and nutrients control grassland plant diversity via light limitation

Cited by 675 publications

References 29 publications

Spatially Heterogeneous Perturbations Homogenize the Regulation of Insect Herbivores

Spatially Heterogeneous Perturbations Homogenize the Regulation of Insect Herbivores

Climate modifies response of non-native and native species richness to nutrient enrichment

Drivers of diversity

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