Plant litter loss exacerbates drought influences on grasslands

IF 8.3 1区生物学 Q1 PLANT SCIENCES

New Phytologist Pub Date : 2023-11-06 DOI:10.1111/nph.19374

Wanjie Chen, Lin Jiang, Ruoyu Jia, Bo Tang, Hongzhi Jiang, Yang Wang, Xiaoming Lu, Jishuai Su, Yongfei Bai

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Plant litter is known to affect soil, community, and ecosystem properties. However, we know little about the capacity of litter to modulate grassland responses to climate change.
Using a 7-yr litter removal experiment in a semiarid grassland, here we examined how litter removal interacts with a 2-yr drought to affect soil environments, plant community composition, and ecosystem function.
Litter loss exacerbates the negative impacts of drought on grasslands. Litter removal increased soil temperature but reduced soil moisture and nitrogen mineralization, which substantially increased the negative impacts of drought on primary productivity and the abundance of perennial rhizomatous graminoids. Moreover, complete litter removal shifted plant community composition from grass-dominated to forb-dominated and reduced species and functional group asynchrony, resulting in lower ecosystem temporal stability.
Our results suggest that ecological processes that lead to reduction in litter, such as burning, grazing, and haying, may render ecosystems more vulnerable and impair the capacity of grasslands to withstand drought events.

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植物枯枝落叶的减少加剧了干旱对草原的影响。

众所周知，植物垃圾会影响土壤、群落和生态系统特性。然而，我们对垃圾调节草原对气候变化反应的能力知之甚少。在半干旱草原上进行了为期7年的枯枝落叶去除实验，我们研究了枯枝落叶的去除如何与2年的干旱相互作用，从而影响土壤环境、植物群落组成和生态系统功能。落叶层的减少加剧了干旱对草原的负面影响。落叶层的清除增加了土壤温度，但降低了土壤水分和氮矿化，这大大增加了干旱对初级生产力和多年生根茎类禾本科植物丰度的负面影响。此外，完全清除枯枝落叶使植物群落组成从以草为主转变为以杂草为主，并减少了物种和官能团的异步性，导致生态系统的时间稳定性降低。我们的研究结果表明，导致垃圾减少的生态过程，如焚烧、放牧和干草，可能会使生态系统更加脆弱，并削弱草原抵御干旱事件的能力。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

New Phytologist 生物-植物科学

自引率

5.30%

发文量

728

期刊介绍： New Phytologist is an international electronic journal published 24 times a year. It is owned by the New Phytologist Foundation, a non-profit-making charitable organization dedicated to promoting plant science. The journal publishes excellent, novel, rigorous, and timely research and scholarship in plant science and its applications. The articles cover topics in five sections: Physiology & Development, Environment, Interaction, Evolution, and Transformative Plant Biotechnology. These sections encompass intracellular processes, global environmental change, and encourage cross-disciplinary approaches. The journal recognizes the use of techniques from molecular and cell biology, functional genomics, modeling, and system-based approaches in plant science. Abstracting and Indexing Information for New Phytologist includes Academic Search, AgBiotech News & Information, Agroforestry Abstracts, Biochemistry & Biophysics Citation Index, Botanical Pesticides, CAB Abstracts®, Environment Index, Global Health, and Plant Breeding Abstracts, and others.