SCIENCE@home

Climate warming reduces the temporal stability of plant community biomass production

Zhiyuan Ma,Huiying Liu,Zhaorong Mi,Zhenhua Zhang,Yonghui Wang,W. Xu,Lin Jiang,Jinsheng He

Published 2017 in Nature Communications

ABSTRACT

Anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a critical environmental problem, prompting frequent investigations into its consequences for various ecological systems. Few studies, however, have explored the effect of climate change on ecological stability and the underlying mechanisms. We conduct a field experiment to assess the influence of warming and altered precipitation on the temporal stability of plant community biomass in an alpine grassland located on the Tibetan Plateau. We find that whereas precipitation alteration does not influence biomass temporal stability, warming lowers stability through reducing the degree of species asynchrony. Importantly, biomass temporal stability is not influenced by plant species diversity, but is largely determined by the temporal stability of dominant species and asynchronous population dynamics among the coexisting species. Our findings suggest that ongoing and future climate change may alter stability properties of ecological communities, potentially hindering their ability to provide ecosystem services for humanity. Temporal stability of plant communities is driven by several mechanisms and may be influenced by climate change. Here it is shown that warming, but not precipitation, reduces species asynchrony in an alpine grassland, leading to lower biomass temporal stability.

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-70 of 70 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-100 of 467 citing papers · Page 1 of 5

12345
Next