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Plant community responses to precipitation and spatial pattern of nitrogen supply in an experimental grassland ecosystem

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Abstract

Recent work suggests that soil nutrient heterogeneity may modulate plant responses to drivers of global change, but interactions between N heterogeneity and changes in rainfall regime remain poorly understood. We used a model grassland system to investigate the interactive effects of N application pattern (homogeneous, heterogeneous) and precipitation-magnitude manipulation during the growing season (control, +50 % rainfall, −50 % rainfall) on aboveground biomass and plant community dominance patterns. Our study resulted in four major findings: patchy N addition increased within-plot variability in plant size structure at the species level, but did not alter total aboveground biomass; patchy N addition increased community dominance and caused a shift in the ranking of subordinate plant species; unlike community-level biomass, plant species differed in their biomass response to the rainfall treatments; and neither aboveground biomass nor community dominance showed significant interactions between N pattern and rainfall manipulation, suggesting that grassland responses to patchy N inputs are insensitive to water addition or rainfall reduction in our temperate study system. Overall, our results indicate that the spatial pattern of N inputs has greater effects on species biomass variability and community dominance than on aboveground production. These short-term changes in plant community structure may have significant implications for longer-term patterns of vegetation dynamics and plant-soil feedbacks. Moreover our results suggest that the magnitude of precipitation during the growing season plays a limited role in grassland responses to heterogeneous organic N inputs, emphasizing the need to consider other components of precipitation change in future heterogeneity studies.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank P. Pichon and A. Salcedo for help setting up the experiment. Thanks also to A. Salcedo for assistance with data collection and harvest. This study was supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Chinese Scholarship Council to N. X. The experiment complies with the current laws of the country (France) in which the experiment was performed.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Grassland Ecosystem Research Unit, INRA–UREP, 5 Chemin de Beaulieu, 63039, Clermont-Ferrand, France

    Nianxun Xi, Pascal Carrère & Juliette M. G. Bloor

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  1. Nianxun Xi
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  2. Pascal Carrère
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  3. Juliette M. G. Bloor
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Correspondence to Juliette M. G. Bloor.

Additional information

Communicated by Scott Collins.

This paper is part of the Ph.D. research of the lead author, Nianxun Xi. It addresses an important question in plant community ecology and uses a unique experimental approach to determine how soil heterogeneity interacts with climate change to affect community structure and function in grasslands. A surprising result is that the impacts of resource heterogeneity were not affected by precipitation. Overall, we found that net primary production responses were stable despite spatial variability in resources and changes in species abundances. This is a nice demonstration of how compensation can serve as a stabilizing mechanism for ecosystem processes.

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Xi, N., Carrère, P. & Bloor, J.M.G. Plant community responses to precipitation and spatial pattern of nitrogen supply in an experimental grassland ecosystem. Oecologia 178, 329–338 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-015-3289-3

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