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Globally consistent influences of seasonal precipitation limit grassland biomass response to elevated CO2

Nature Plants volume 5, pages 167–173 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration should stimulate biomass production directly via biochemical stimulation of carbon assimilation, and indirectly via water savings caused by increased plant water-use efficiency. Because of these water savings, the CO2 fertilization effect (CFE) should be stronger at drier sites, yet large differences among experiments in grassland biomass response to elevated CO2 appear to be unrelated to annual precipitation, preventing useful generalizations. Here, we show that, as predicted, the impact of elevated CO2 on biomass production in 19 globally distributed temperate grassland experiments reduces as mean precipitation in seasons other than spring increases, but that it rises unexpectedly as mean spring precipitation increases. Moreover, because sites with high spring precipitation also tend to have high precipitation at other times, these effects of spring and non-spring precipitation on the CO2 response offset each other, constraining the response of ecosystem productivity to rising CO2. This explains why previous analyses were unable to discern a reliable trend between site dryness and the CFE. Thus, the CFE in temperate grasslands worldwide will be constrained by their natural rainfall seasonality such that the stimulation of biomass by rising CO2 could be substantially less than anticipated.

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Fig. 1: Impact of seasonal precipitation on the CFE.
Fig. 2: The CFE across 19 temperate grassland experiments as a function of different potential drivers.
Fig. 3: Predicted CFE of aboveground biomass for given spring and non-spring precipitation values.
Fig. 4: Modelled CFE in temperate grasslands.

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Data availability

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article (and its Supplementary Information files) with the exception of the gridded geographic information system data, which are available from https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/tmc/ (precipitation data) and http://glcf.umd.edu/data/landcover/data.shtml (land-cover data).

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Acknowledgements

We thank R. Brinkhoff for assistance with collating the data for this analysis. This research was initiated at the workshop ‘Using results from global change experiments to inform land model development and calibration’, which was co-sponsored by the US-based INTERFACE Research Coordination Network and Research Group of Global Change Ecology at Henan University (funded by MOST2013CB956300 and NSFC41030104/ D0308).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biological Sciences, School of Natural Sciences, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Mark J. Hovenden

  2. Institute for Applied Ecology New Zealand, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

    Sebastian Leuzinger & Andrew Fletcher

  3. Plant Functional Biology, AgResearch, Palmerston North, New Zealand

    Paul C. D. Newton

  4. Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Simone Fatichi

  5. Institute of Agricultural Sciences, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Andreas Lüscher

  6. Agroscope, Zürich, Switzerland

    Andreas Lüscher

  7. Department of Forest Resources, University of Minnesota, St Paul, MN, USA

    Peter B. Reich

  8. Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Peter B. Reich

  9. Department of Plant Ecology, Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany

    Louise C. Andresen & Juliane Kellner

  10. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Louise C. Andresen

  11. Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Claus Beier

  12. Rangeland Resources Research Unit, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Dana M. Blumenthal

  13. Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Nona R. Chiariello

  14. Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Jeffrey S. Dukes

  15. Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Jeffrey S. Dukes

  16. Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Kirsten Hofmockel

  17. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

    Kirsten Hofmockel

  18. Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Pascal A. Niklaus

  19. College of Life Science, Hebei University, Baoding, Hebei, China

    Jian Song & Shiqiang Wan

  20. Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

    Aimée T. Classen

  21. Department of Biology, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA

    J. Adam Langley

Authors
  1. Mark J. Hovenden
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  19. J. Adam Langley
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Contributions

S.L., J.A.L., M.J.H. and S.F. conceived the research idea and designed the study, with assistance from P.C.D.N. and K.H. M.J.H., S.L., P.C.D.N., J.A.L. and S.F. performed the analysis and, together with A.L. and P.B.R., led the writing of the manuscript. A.F. performed the mapping and all geographical analyses. P.C.D.N., M.J.H., J.A.L., L.C.A., D.M.B., N.R.C., J.S.D., J.K., A.L., P.A.N., C.B., P.B.R., S.W. and J.S. contributed unpublished data. All authors contributed to the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Mark J. Hovenden.

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Hovenden, M.J., Leuzinger, S., Newton, P.C.D. et al. Globally consistent influences of seasonal precipitation limit grassland biomass response to elevated CO2. Nature Plants 5, 167–173 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-018-0356-x

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