Danet, A. orcid.org/0000-0002-1592-9483, Bautista, S., Génin, A. orcid.org/0000-0002-3333-1338 et al. (3 more authors) (2024) Species diversity promotes facilitation under stressful conditions. Oikos, 2024 (9). e10303. ISSN 0030-1299
Abstract
Climate change is expected to lead to a drier world, with more frequent and severe droughts, constituting a growing threat to biodiversity, especially in drylands. Positive plant−plant interactions, such as nurse plants facilitating beneficiary communities in their understorey, could mitigate such climate‐induced stress. However, testing the real‐world relevance of nurse facilitation under drought requires accounting for interactions within the diverse beneficiary communities, which may reduce, or amplify the buffering effect of a nurse. Here, we investigated when and how the interactions among nurse plants and beneficiary community members buffered drought effects in a Mediterranean semiarid abandoned cropland. We transplanted sapling beneficiary communities of either one or three species either under a nurse or in open microsites for different soil moisture levels through watering. Net facilitative effects on survival and biomass were only observed when beneficiary communities were species‐diverse and under drought (without watering), meaning that under these conditions, facilitation provided by the nurse had larger positive effects than the negative effects stemming from competition with the nurse and among beneficiary species. Nurses appear to be generating these increases in survival and biomass in drought conditions via two mechanisms commonly associated with watering in open sites: they generate complementarity among the beneficiaries and shift traits to lower stress profiles. Contrasting with watering, which was found to enhance competitive hierarchy, our study shows that nurses appear to alter species dominance, favouring the less competitive species. Our results highlight three mechanisms (complementarity, competitive dominance, and trait plasticity) by which nurse species could mitigate the loss of biodiversity and biomass production due to water stress. Maintaining and supporting nurse species is thus a potentially pivotal approach in the face of projected increase in drought conditions for many drylands across the world.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Authors. Oikos published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Nordic Society Oikos. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Keywords: | biodiversity; dryland; ecosystem functioning; facilitation; functional traits; plant–plant interactions |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number NATURAL ENVIRONMENT RESEARCH COUNCIL NE/T003502/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 30 Apr 2024 15:33 |
Last Modified: | 15 Nov 2024 16:22 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/oik.10303 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:212047 |