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A decade of insights into grassland ecosystem responses to global environmental change

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 1, Article number: 0118 (2017) Cite this article

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Abstract

Earth's biodiversity and carbon uptake by plants, or primary productivity, are intricately interlinked, underlie many essential ecosystem processes, and depend on the interplay among environmental factors, many of which are being changed by human activities. While ecological theory generalizes across taxa and environments, most empirical tests of factors controlling diversity and productivity have been observational, single-site experiments, or meta-analyses, limiting our understanding of variation among site-level responses and tests of general mechanisms. A synthesis of results from ten years of a globally distributed, coordinated experiment, the Nutrient Network (NutNet), demonstrates that species diversity promotes ecosystem productivity and stability, and that nutrient supply and herbivory control diversity via changes in composition, including invasions of non-native species and extinction of native species. Distributed experimental networks are a powerful tool for tests and integration of multiple theories and for generating multivariate predictions about the effects of global changes on future ecosystems.

The variety of life forms on Earth, ‘biodiversity’, and the conversion of sunlight energy and carbon into plant biomass, ‘productivity’, are two of the most fundamental properties of ecosystems and are changing globally1,2 in response to ongoing changes in many factors3,4, including nutrient pollution, species invasions, temperature, precipitation, and the distribution and density of domestic and wild grazers5–7. Ecosystem- and human-health both depend on biodiversity and productivity8,9, highlighting the pressing need to understand how changing environments will influence ecological communities. The rich theoretical lineage of ecology provides generalizable, mechanistic hypotheses that guide empirical inquiry into the effects of a changing environment on biodiversity and primary productivity. A mechanistic understanding of this relationship has relevance for understanding how species interactions shape functional processes in communities, which in turn can predict the conditions under which species will buffer or exacerbate global environmental change. Historically, empirical tests of the hypotheses generated by theory have taken the form of observations at various scales10,11,12, experiments at single sites13,14, and meta-analyses that seek generality by quantitatively synthesizing the results of single-site experiments15,16.

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Figure 1: The NutNet collaborative experiment tests the interactive factors and feedbacks determining grassland biodiversity and productivity.
Figure 2: The spatial and environmental range of the >100 sites participating in the NutNet project.

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Acknowledgements

We thank each of the researchers who have contributed data and ideas to the Nutrient Network (http://www.nutnet.org), Supplementary Table 1 lists contributing sites (2007–2016). Grants to E.T.B. and E.W.S. from the National Science Foundation (NSF-DEB-1042132, NSF-DEB-1234162), and the Institute on the Environment (DG-0001-13) supported parts of this work. J.B.G. was supported by the USGS Ecosystems and Climate and Land Use Change programmes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, 1479 Gortner Avenue, 140 Gortner Laboratory, Saint Paul, 55108, Minnesota, USA

    Elizabeth T. Borer & Eric W. Seabloom

  2. US Geological Survey, Wetland and Aquatic Research Center, 700 Cajundome Boulevard, Lafayette, 70506, Louisiana, USA

    James B. Grace

  3. Department of Physiological Diversity, Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research – UFZ, Permoserstrasse 15, Leipzig, 04318, Germany

    W. Stanley Harpole

  4. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Deutscher Platz 5e, Leipzig, 04103, Germany

    W. Stanley Harpole

  5. Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Am Kirchtor 1, Halle (Saale), 06108, Germany

    W. Stanley Harpole

  6. Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, N1G 2W1, Ontario, Canada

    Andrew S. MacDougall

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  1. Elizabeth T. Borer
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  2. James B. Grace
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  3. W. Stanley Harpole
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Contributions

E.T.B. conceived and drafted the manuscript; J.B.G., W.S.H., A.S.M. and E.W.S. contributed to writing.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elizabeth T. Borer.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary Information

List of Nutrient Network contributing sites. (PDF 248 kb)

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Borer, E., Grace, J., Harpole, W. et al. A decade of insights into grassland ecosystem responses to global environmental change. Nat Ecol Evol 1, 0118 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0118

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