Abstract
Mowing for hay is an important land use in grasslands that is affected by precipitation variability, due to the water-limited nature of these ecosystems. Past land use and precipitation conditions can have legacy effects on ecosystem functions, potentially altering responses to both mowing and precipitation. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how natural variation in precipitation will affect plant responses to changes in mowing intensity. We conducted a seven-year field experiment with three mowing intensity treatments compared to the traditional mowing intensity (5 cm stubble height) as a control: increased mowing (2 cm stubble), decreased mowing (8 cm stubble) and ceased mowing. Decreased mowing increased both plant aboveground net primary productivity [ANPP] and forage yield across the whole community, driven by increases in graminoids, mainly owing to the positive response of plants to precipitation. Both mowing disturbance and precipitation variability had legacy effects on plant ANPP; however, these responses differed among the whole community, graminoid, and forb levels. Current-year community-wide ANPP [ANPPn] was positively associated with current-year precipitation [PPTn] in all mowing treatments, driven by positive precipitation responses of the dominant graminoids. For forbs, however, ANPPn was negatively associated with prior-year growing season precipitation [PPTn-1] across mowing treatments, potentially due to lagged competition with the dominant graminoids. Our results suggest that the response of the dominant graminoids is the primary factor determining the response of ANPP to mowing and precipitation variability in these grassland ecosystems, and highlight that decreasing mowing intensity may maximize both herder’s income and grassland sustainability.
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The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank many students for continuously collecting data in the field and for laboratory analysis during the study period. We also thank the China Scholarship Council for its support.
Funding
This study was funded by the Project of Basic Resources Survey of Ministry of Science and Technology (SQ2019FY010072), National Natural Science Foundation of China (31861143001, 31660108), Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia (2020ZD03), Key Projects of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (2019ZD008), Outstanding Doctoral Introduction Fund of School (NDYB2019-5) and Key Laboratory of Grassland Resources, Ministry of Education (Inner Mongolia Agricultural University).
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FZ, KB, MZ and GH conceived and designed the experiments; FZ, TZ performed the experiments and analyzed the data, FZ, JAB and BZ wrote the manuscript. All authors critically contributed to drafts as well as giving the final approval for publication.
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Communicated by Douglas A Frank.
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Zhang, F., Bennett, J.A., Zhang, B. et al. Responses of grassland productivity to mowing intensity and precipitation variability in a temperate steppe. Oecologia 201, 259–268 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-022-05305-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-022-05305-6