Warming alters plant phylogenetic and functional community structure

Abstract

1. Climate change is known to affect many facets of the Earth's ecosystems. However, little is known about its impacts on phylogenetic and functional properties of ecological communities. 2. Here we studied the responses of plant communities in an alpine grassland on the Tibetan Plateau to environmental warming across taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional levels in a 6-year multiple-level warming experiment. 3. While low-level warming did not alter either plant species richness or phylogenetic/functional community structure, high-level warming significantly decreased species richness. Higher level warming more strongly reduced soil moisture and caused stronger environmental filtering, consequently changing species composition and community structure. At the plant functional trait level, high-level warming promoted species turnover through altering the effects of traits such as plant height on species extinction and SLA on species colonization. As a result, high-, but not low-level warming drove phylogenetic/functional community structure from overdispersion to randomness, by filtering out species that were functionally dissimilar and distantly related to the resident species. 4. Synthesis. Our study provides evidence that the responses of plant phylogenetic and functional community structure to low warming differ from those in the future scenarios of increasing temperature. Importantly, the extinction of species that was functionally dissimilar and distantly related to the resident species contributed to alterations in plant community structure under high warming. Our study underscores the need to incorporate the phylogenetic and functional perspectives to gain a more complete understanding of community responses to climate warming.

Multiple‐scale negative impacts of warming on ecosystem carbon use efficiency across the Tibetan Plateau grasslands

“…The negative effects of HW on the influential factors (e.g. AGB) of CUEe are stronger than those of LW (Ganjurjav et al., 2016; N. Li et al., 2011; Zhu et al., 2020). This can be mostly explained by mechanisms in which ecosystem functions have threshold responses to warming‐induced drought (Quan et al., 2019) and drastic declines in corresponding ecological processes if SM is below the threshold (Berdugo et al., 2020).…”

“…Warming alters atmospheric and soil water availability by stimulating evapotranspiration, thereby influencing GEP and ER (Niu et al., 2008). In addition to these environmental factors, warming may affect CUEe and its components by modulating elements of community structure or vegetation growth, including community composition (Yang et al., 2011; Zhu et al., 2020), plant phenology (Ganjurjav et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2017) and species physiology (Dorji et al., 2013; N. Li et al., 2011; F. Li et al., 2019).…”

ChinaSpec: A Network for Long‐Term Ground‐Based Measurements of Solar‐Induced Fluorescence in China

“…These results demonstrate the potential of continuous SIF measurements for understanding diurnal and seasonal canopy SIF variations across different vegetation types, and also highlight the importance of networking on SIF measurements. Different relationships between SIF and GPP have been reported in different ecosystems at the seasonal scale (e.g., Damm et al, 2015;Li et al, 2020;Nichol et al, 2019;Wieneke et al, 2018;Yang et al, 2015Yang et al, , 2018a. At the diurnal scale, however, it is not clear how this relationship varies across different vegetation types.…”

“…Over the last decade, most efforts to investigate the relationship between SIF and GPP derive from the satellite SIF data (e.g., Guanter et al, 2014;Sun et al, 2018). Groundbased SIF measurements have also recently emerged as a useful tool to study the temporal and spatial variability of SIF and its link to GPP at the site scale (e.g., Damm et al, 2015;Li et al, 2020;Nichol et al, 2019;Yang et al, 2015). Strong linkages between SIF and GPP have been found, but the form of the relationships varies (nonlinear or linear) depending on vegetation types and spatiotemporal scales (Mohammed et al, 2019).…”

Plant sedimentary ancient DNA from Far East Russia covering the last 28 ka reveals different assembly rules in cold and warm climates

“…In contrast, a community with high phylogenetic diversity hosts an assembly of distantly related species (Webb 2000, Webb and Pitman 2002). On the one hand, phylogenetically more varied plant species have been found to coexist, when, as a result of warming, more soil nutrients are available (Chu and Grogan 2010, Zhu et al 2020). On the other hand, climate warming may decrease phylogenetic diversity (Thuiller et al 2011) through environmental filtering due to drought (Dorji et al 2012).…”