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Climate Effects on Prairie Productivity Partially Ameliorated by Soil Nutrients and Plant Community Responses

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Net primary productivity (NPP) is a key ecosystem function of plant communities. Climate change is expected to affect NPP both directly and indirectly through associated edaphic and plant community factors. Changes in soil nutrients, plant species richness and/or functional group dominance may amplify or counteract direct climatic effects on NPP, and responses may differ above-versus belowground, making it challenging to predict the net effects on NPP. In this study, we manipulated temperature and precipitation at four sites spanning a latitudinal Mediterranean-climate gradient in the Pacific Northwest, USA, and measured aboveground, belowground, and total NPP responses in experimentally assembled prairie plant communities. Using structural equation models, we disentangled the direct effects of climate from its indirect effects through soil nutrient availability and plant community responses. We found that warming, primarily by reducing soil moisture (that is, drying), had a net negative effect on all aspects of NPP, but these negative effects were partially ameliorated by increasing nitrogen and phosphorus availability, as well as changes to the plant community. Specifically, warming, drying, and greater nutrient availability caused species richness to decline, leading to greater dominance by a restricted set of functional groups, which positively affected aboveground NPP. Furthermore, a shift from perennial grass to annual grass dominance increased the ratio of aboveground to belowground NPP. Our results demonstrate that the indirect effects of climate change can help partially buffer the negative direct effects on NPP in Mediterranean-climate prairies. However, increasing soil moisture limitation may still overwhelm the positive effects of such intermediary pathways.

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Data used in this study are included as Supplementary Information, available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-022-00811-3.

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Acknowledgements

This study was made possible by field and laboratory assistance from many individuals including Holden Jones, Matthew Krna, Kathryn Nock, Lorien Reynolds, Megan Sherritt, Leah Thompson, and Xing Wu. We thank members of the Hallett Lab at the University of Oregon for their thoughtful comments and feedback on a first draft of this manuscript. We owe our gratitude to the Siskiyou Field Institute, The Nature Conservancy, and Capitol Land Trust for allowing us to conduct our experiments on their properties. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation’s Macrosystems Biology Program, award # 1340847, and the US Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, award # DE-FG02-09ER604719.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Applied Ecology, Corvallis, Oregon, 97333, USA

    Paul B. Reed

  2. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15260, USA

    Hannah R. Assour

  3. Environmental Studies Program, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, 97403, USA

    Aimee Okotie-Oyekan

  4. Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, 97403, USA

    Graham T. Bailes, Aaron A. Nelson, Laurel Pfeifer-Meister, Bitty A. Roy & Scott D. Bridgham

  5. Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, 97403, USA

    Bart R. Johnson

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Author Contributions PBR, BRJ, LPM, BAR, and SDB designed the experiment. All authors performed the research and collected the data. PBR, HRA, and AOO sorted and weighed biomass. GTB and AAN curated and processed climate data. PBR analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. All authors provided important intellectual contributions during revisions and gave final approval for publication.

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Reed, P.B., Assour, H.R., Okotie-Oyekan, A. et al. Climate Effects on Prairie Productivity Partially Ameliorated by Soil Nutrients and Plant Community Responses. Ecosystems 26, 983–999 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-022-00811-3

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