Sown alfalfa pasture decreases grazing intensity while increasing soil carbon: Experimental observations and DNDC model predictions

Xu, Le; Ye, Liming; Nie, Yingying; Yang, Guoxiang; Xin, Xiaoping; Yuan, Bo; Yang, X. B.

doi:10.3389/fpls.2022.1019966

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 53 publications

(75 reference statements)

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“…Moreover, government assistance is also needed in the selection and management of available climate-resilient germplasm resources. Recent research indicated that, for example, winter-hardy, indigenous species of alfalfa may provide both adaptation and mitigation benefits for northern grasslands in China [62,63]. In this context, the most important implication of our results is that climate adaptation is currently a more important and, thus, a more demanding task than climate mitigation, suggesting that the focus of grassland management efforts, including ecological restoration programs, should aim to make the entire grassland-livestock system more climate-resilient.…”

Section: Policy and Management Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fourfold Increase in Climate Contributions to Grassland Soil Organic Carbon Variabilities and Its Policy Implications

Xue,

Xu,

Nie

et al. 2023

Agronomy

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Grassland is one of the largest terrestrial ecosystems and contains approximately 20 percent of the world’s soil organic carbon (SOC) stock. A relatively small SOC change can cause large impacts on the global climate. However, the contributions from climatic factors to SOC changes, relative to other natural and anthropogenic factors, remains controversial. Here, we evaluate the relative contributions of climate, landscape, and management factors to SOC variabilities using variance decomposition coupled with generalized additive models and resampled soil data from the original Second National Soil Survey profile locations across the temperate grasslands in northern Inner Mongolia in 2022. Our results indicate that climate contributions increased from 13.7% in the 1980s to 65.5% in 2022, compared to decreased contributions from landscape and management factors. The relative contributions from landscape and management factors decreased from 37.5% and 48.8% in the 1980s, respectively, to 19.2% and 15.4% in 2022. This shows that the climate has shifted from being a minor contributor to a primary controller of grassland SOC variability over the 40 years since the 1980s. We, therefore, argue that future grassland management and policy regimes should become climate-centric, while the current institutional momentum for grassland conservation and restoration should be maintained.

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Section: Policy and Management Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fourfold Increase in Climate Contributions to Grassland Soil Organic Carbon Variabilities and Its Policy Implications

Xue,

Xu,

Nie

et al. 2023

Agronomy

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“…On the one hand, there is a good chance that the dual goals of grassland utilization and conservation can be simultaneously met under these management schemes (Tälle et al, 2016;Li et al, 2022). On the other hand, although previous research suggested that diversity-productivity synergy could be fulfilled via, e.g., competition mediation (Peintinger and Bergamini, 2006;Fagundez, 2016) and plant-soil interactions (Storkey et al, 2015;Xu et al, 2022b), it is still unclear how this synergy can be reliably triggered and temporally sustained. More research is therefore needed.…”

Section: Priorities For Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Land use intensity controls the diversity-productivity relationship in northern temperate grasslands of China

Yan,

Xu,

et al. 2023

Front. Plant Sci.

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IntroductionThe diversity-productivity relationship is a central issue in maintaining the grassland ecosystem’s multifunctionality and supporting its sustainable management. Currently, the mainstream opinion on the diversity-productivity relationship recognizes that increases in species diversity promote ecosystem productivity.MethodsHere, we challenge this opinion by developing a generalized additive model-based framework to quantify the response rate of grassland productivity to plant species diversity using vegetation survey data we collected along a land-use intensity gradient in northern China.ResultsOur results show that the grassland aboveground biomass responds significantly positively to the Shannon-Wiener diversity index at a rate of 46.8 g m-2 per unit increase of the Shannon-Wiener index in enclosure-managed grasslands, under the co-influence of climate and landscape factors. The aboveground biomass response rate stays positive at a magnitude of 47.1 g m-2 in forest understory grassland and 39.7 g m-2 in wetland grassland. Conversely, the response rate turns negative in heavily grazed grasslands at -55.8 g m-2, transiting via near-neutral rates of -7.0 and -7.3 g m-2 in mowing grassland and moderately grazed grassland, respectively.DiscussionThese results suggest that the diversity-productivity relationship in temperate grasslands not only varies by magnitude but also switches directions under varying levels of land use intensity. This highlights the need to consider land use intensity as a more important ecological integrity indicator for future ecological conservation programs in temperate grasslands.

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“…LOS change in croplands has significant implications for climate change mitigation, adaptation, crop yield, and food security [14][15][16][17][18]. Moreover, process-based crop models were developed and fine-tuned to crop cycles observed in the field [19,20]. It is thus a prerequisite to calibrate satellite-derived phenology to ground observations before it can be spatially assimilated by these models [21][22][23].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Calibration of MODIS-Derived Cropland Growing Season Using the Climotransfer Function and Ground Observations

Grave

Ranst

et al. 2022

Remote Sensing

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The global environment experienced notable changes in the recent past of planet Earth. Satellite remote sensing has played an increasingly important role in monitoring and characterizing these changes. Being recognized as a sensitive indicator of global climate change, land surface phenology (LSP) observations by satellite remote sensing have received much attention in recent years; however, much less attention has been paid to the calibration of these observations using standardized procedures. Here, we propose a new approach to calibrating the satellite LSP products by developing a climotransfer function (CTF) based on a polynomial regression of the satellite-ground observation difference in key crop phenophases against climatic factors. We illustrate the model development and evaluation process with a case study of the cropland growing season in Northeast China (NEC) from 2001 to 2010 using the MODIS LSP product MCD12Q2 Collection 6 and the ground-observed crop phenology and climatic data from 98 agrometeorological stations across the region. Our results showed that the start of the cropland growing season (SOS) derived from MODIS data compared well to the ground-observed SOS, whereas the MODIS-derived season end (EOS) was delayed by 15.5 d, relative to ground observation. The MODIS-derived EOS was, therefore, spatiotemporally calibrated using a CTF model fitted to the satellite-ground difference in EOS (∆EOS) versus two climatic factors, namely, the growing degree-days on the base temperature of 10 °C (GDD10) and cloud cover (CL). The calibrated MODIS data revealed that the cropland growing season in NEC tended to shorten at 4.5 d decade−1 during 2001–2010, mainly driven by a significant delay in SOS at a similar rate, whereas no trend was detected for EOS. The calibrated data also revealed a significant shortening gradient of 1.7 d degree−1 of latitude northward. These spatiotemporal patterns would have been erroneously characterized if calibration had not been applied. More attention is therefore called to the proper calibration of satellite LSP products prior to any meaningful applications.

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Sown alfalfa pasture decreases grazing intensity while increasing soil carbon: Experimental observations and DNDC model predictions

Cited by 4 publications

References 53 publications

Fourfold Increase in Climate Contributions to Grassland Soil Organic Carbon Variabilities and Its Policy Implications

Fourfold Increase in Climate Contributions to Grassland Soil Organic Carbon Variabilities and Its Policy Implications

Land use intensity controls the diversity-productivity relationship in northern temperate grasslands of China

Calibration of MODIS-Derived Cropland Growing Season Using the Climotransfer Function and Ground Observations

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