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Antithetical effects of nitrogen and water availability on community similarity of semiarid grasslands: evidence from a nine-year manipulation experiment

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Abstract

Aims

Theoretical and observational studies have suggested that environmental variations would change compositional similarity between plant communities. However, this topic has rarely been examined via experiments involving direct manipulation of resources utilized by plant communities.

Methods

A 9-year field manipulation experiment was conducted to examine the effects of nitrogen addition and increased water on community similarity between a steppe and an old field in the semiarid region of northern China.

Results

Over the experimental period, nitrogen addition reduced community similarity between the steppe and the old field, whereas water addition enhanced community similarity. These treatment effects were closely related to changes in diversity characteristics as well as abundance of functional groups and dominant species of plant communities.

Conclusions

These results highlight the importance of resource availability in regulating the trajectory of ecosystem succession, and suggest that the increase in atmospheric nitrogen deposition in northern China will contribute to divergence between the steppe and the old field, whereas the increase in growing-season precipitation may encourage convergence between the two grasslands with respect to species composition during succession. Thus the decrease in community similarity caused by nitrogen enrichment may be counteracted, at least partially, by precipitation increase under changing atmosphere and climate.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to prof Lin Jiang, Hui Li and Xugao Wang for suggestions on data analysis. Many thanks to Guilin Zhu, Mingming Fu, Shan Yang and Xiaobin Li for providing assistance in carrying out the field experiment. We also thank the Duolun Restoration Ecology Research Station for permission to access the study site. This study was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31370009, 41371251 and 31300387), and State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology (Grant No. LFSE2013-01 and LFSE2015-16).

Compliance with Ethical Standards

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Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. This study does not involve human participants and/or animals.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, Liaoning, 110016, China

    Zhuwen Xu, Haiyan Ren, Jiangping Cai, Ruzhen Wang, Peng He, Mai-He Li, Bernard J. Lewis, Xingguo Han & Yong Jiang

  2. Forest dynamics, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, CH-8903, Birmensdorf, Switzerland

    Mai-He Li

  3. State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093, China

    Xingguo Han

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  1. Zhuwen Xu
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  5. Peng He
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  9. Yong Jiang
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Correspondence to Yong Jiang.

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Responsible Editor: Harry Olde Venterink.

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Figure S1

The cover-based Bray-Curtis similarity between the steppe and the old field in response to nitrogen and water addition across nine years from 2005 to 2013. P values of repeated measures ANOVA with split plot design are reported when P < 0.05. Letters over bars indicate significant differences (P < 0.05) among treatments. Bars indicate means ± SE. Treatments include: C–control; N–nitrogen addition; W– water addition; and WN–combined addition of nitrogen and water. (DOC 26 kb)

Table S1

Repeated measures ANOVAs results for the effects of year (Y), nitrogen (N), water (W) and their interactions on community similarity, and number of shared species in a steppe and an old field in northern China. (DOC 32 kb)

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Xu, Z., Ren, H., Cai, J. et al. Antithetical effects of nitrogen and water availability on community similarity of semiarid grasslands: evidence from a nine-year manipulation experiment. Plant Soil 397, 357–369 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-015-2634-y

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