Abstract
Both the dominance and the mass ratio hypotheses predict that plant internal nutrient cycling in ecosystems is determined by the dominant species within plant communities. We tested this hypothesis under conditions of extreme drought by assessing plant nutrient (N, P and K) uptake and resorption in response to experimentally imposed precipitation reductions in two semiarid grasslands of northern China. These two communities shared similar environmental conditions, but had different dominant species—one was dominated by a rhizomatous grass (Leymus chinensis) and the other by a bunchgrass (Stipa grandis). Results showed that responses of N to drought differed between the two communities with drought decreasing green leaf N concentration and resorption in the community dominated by the rhizomatous grass, but not in the bunchgrass-dominated community. In contrast, negative effects of drought on green leaf P and K concentrations and their resorption efficiencies were consistent across the two communities. Additionally, in each community, the effects of extreme drought on soil N, P and K supply did not change synchronously with that on green leaf N, P and K concentrations, and senesced leaf N, P and K concentrations showed no response to extreme drought. Consistent with the dominance/mass ratio hypothesis, our findings suggest that differences in dominant species and their growth form (i.e., rhizomatous vs bunch grass) play an important nutrient-specific role in mediating plant internal nutrient cycling across communities within a single region.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all the people who have worked at the Extreme Drought in Grasslands Experiment (EDGE) platform for assistance in carrying out the field experiment. In addition, we profusely thank the Inner Mongolia Grassland Ecosystem Research Station for providing long-term meteorological records. This study was supported by funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41320104002 and 41600302) and National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFC0500601 and 2016YFC0500602). AKK and MDS were funded by the US National Science Foundation Macrosystems Biology program in support of the EDGE project. JS and JP were funded by the European Research Council Synergy grant ERC-SyG-2013-610028 IMBALANCE-P, the Spanish Government grant CGL2013-48074-P and the Catalan Government grant SGR 2014-274.
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QY, ZW and XH designed the study; WL, XZ, CX, WM, XY, XL and YB performed the experiment; WL, JS, JP and QY analyzed the data, WL wrote the first draft, and all the coauthors revised the manuscript.
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Communicated by Mercedes Bustamante.
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Luo, W., Xu, C., Ma, W. et al. Effects of extreme drought on plant nutrient uptake and resorption in rhizomatous vs bunchgrass-dominated grasslands. Oecologia 188, 633–643 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-018-4232-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-018-4232-1