ORCID Profile
0000-0001-7959-9092
Current Organisation
Lanzhou University
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Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 19-08-2019
Abstract: Accurate prediction of community responses to global change drivers (GCDs) is critical given the effects of bio ersity on ecosystem services. There is consensus that human activities are driving species extinctions at the global scale, but debate remains over whether GCDs are systematically altering local communities worldwide. Across 105 experiments that included over 400 experimental manipulations, we found evidence for a lagged response of herbaceous plant communities to GCDs caused by shifts in the identities and relative abundances of species, often without a corresponding difference in species richness. These results provide evidence that community responses are pervasive across a wide variety of GCDs on long-term temporal scales and that these responses increase in strength when multiple GCDs are simultaneously imposed.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 10-06-2019
Abstract: Predicting changes in plant ersity in response to human activities represents one of the major challenges facing ecologists and land managers striving for sustainable ecosystem management. Classical field studies have emphasized the importance of community primary productivity in regulating changes in plant species richness. However, experimental studies have yielded inconsistent empirical evidence, suggesting that primary productivity is not the sole determinant of plant ersity. Recent work has shown that more accurate predictions of changes in species ersity can be achieved by combining measures of species’ cover and height into an index of space resource utilization (SRU). While the SRU approach provides reliable predictions, it is time‐consuming and requires extensive taxonomic expertise. Ecosystem processes and plant community structure are likely driven primarily by dominant species (mass ratio effect). Within communities, it is likely that dominant and rare species have opposite contributions to overall bio ersity trends. We, therefore, suggest that better species richness predictions can be achieved by utilizing SRU assessments of only the dominant species (SRU D ), as compared to SRU or biomass of the entire community. Here, we assess the ability of these measures to predict changes in plant ersity as driven by nutrient addition and herbivore exclusion. First, we tested our hypotheses by carrying out a detailed analysis in an alpine grassland that measured all species within the community. Next, we assessed the broader applicability of our approach by measuring the first three dominant species for five additional experimental grassland sites across a wide geographic and habitat range. We show that SRU D outperforms community biomass, as well as community SRU, in predicting bio ersity dynamics in response to nutrients and herbivores in an alpine grassland. Across our additional sites, SRU D yielded far better predictions of changes in species richness than community biomass, demonstrating the robustness and generalizable nature of this approach. Synthesis. The SRU D approach provides a simple, non‐destructive and more accurate means to monitor and predict the impact of global change drivers and management interventions on plant communities, thereby facilitating efforts to maintain and recover plant ersity.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 23-10-2020
DOI: 10.1038/S41467-020-19252-4
Abstract: Eutrophication is a widespread environmental change that usually reduces the stabilizing effect of plant ersity on productivity in local communities. Whether this effect is scale dependent remains to be elucidated. Here, we determine the relationship between plant ersity 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 ersity) 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 ersity to both of these stabilizing mechanisms, thus diminishing the positive effect of bio ersity on stability at differing spatial scales. Our findings suggest that preserving grassland functional stability requires conservation of plant ersity within and among ecological communities.
No related grants have been discovered for Pengfei Zhang.