General destabilizing effects of eutrophication on grassland productivity at multiple spatial scales

Abstract

Eutrophication is a widespread environmental change that usually reduces the stabilizing effect of plant diversity on productivity in local communities. Whether this effect is scale dependent remains to be elucidated. Here, we determine the relationship between plant diversity and temporal stability of productivity for 243 plant communities from 42 grasslands across the globe and quantify the effect of chronic fertilization on these relationships. Unfertilized local communities with more plant species exhibit greater asynchronous dynamics among species in response to natural environmental fluctuations, resulting in greater local stability (alpha stability). Moreover, neighborhood communities that have greater spatial variation in plant species composition within sites (higher beta diversity) have greater spatial asynchrony of productivity among communities, resulting in greater stability at the larger scale (gamma stability). Importantly, fertilization consistently weakens the contribution of plant diversity to both of these stabilizing mechanisms, thus diminishing the positive effect of biodiversity on stability at differing spatial scales. Our findings suggest that preserving grassland functional stability requires conservation of plant diversity within and among ecological communities.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Hautier, Y Zhang, P Loreau, M Wilcox, KR Seabloom, EW Borer, ET Byrnes, JEK Koerner, SE Komatsu, KJ Lefcheck, JS Hector, A Adler, PB Alberti, J Arnillas, CA Bakker, JD Brudvig, LA Bugalho, MN Cadotte, M Caldeira, MC Carroll, O Crawley, M Collins, SL Daleo, P Dee, LE Eisenhauer, N Eskelinen, A Fay, PA Gilbert, B Hansar, A Isbell, F Knops, JMH MacDougall, AS McCulley, RL Moore, JL Morgan, JW Mori, AS Peri, PL Pos, ET Power, SA Price, JN Reich, PB Risch, AC Roscher, C Sankaran, M https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1661-6542 Schütz, M Smith, M Stevens, C Tognetti, PM Virtanen, R Wardle, GM Wilfahrt, PA Wang, S
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2020. 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/.
Keywords:	Biodiversity; Community ecology; Ecosystem services; Grassland ecology
Dates:	Accepted: 5 October 2020 Published (online): 23 October 2020 Published: December 2020
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > School of Biology (Leeds)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	16 Nov 2020 14:43
Last Modified:	16 Nov 2020 14:43
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Nature Research
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41467-020-19252-4
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:168020

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General destabilizing effects of eutrophication on grassland productivity at multiple spatial scales

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