Severe effects of long-term drought on calcareous grassland seed banks

Abstract

Climate change models project shifts in precipitation patterns at regional and global scales. Increases in dry areas and the occurrence of drought predicted in future scenarios are likely to threaten grassland ecosystems. Calcareous grassland seed banks have proven to be resistant to short-term drought, but their responses to long-term drought are unknown. Here we show that 14 years of summer drought changed calcareous grassland seed bank composition, reducing its size and richness, and that these responses do not simply reflect patterns in the above-ground vegetation. Moreover, the effect of drought was larger on seed banks than on vegetation, and above-ground responses mediated by soil depth were less evident in the seed bank than in the vegetation. These results demonstrate that the severity of drought effects on calcareous grasslands is larger than previously thought, and show that this ecosystem is highly vulnerable and has low resilience to predicted decreases in soil moisture.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Basto, S. Thompson, K. Grime, J.P. Fridley, J.D. Calhim, S. Askew, A.P. Rees, M. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8513-9906
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2018 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 15 August 2017 Published (online): 12 February 2018 Published: 12 February 2018
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) > Department of Animal and Plant Sciences (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	05 Apr 2019 13:56
Last Modified:	05 Apr 2019 13:56
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Nature Research
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41612-017-0007-3
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:144617

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Severe effects of long-term drought on calcareous grassland seed banks

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