Abstract
Over the past century at the National Bison Range, temperature has increased by 0.6 °C, and annual precipitation has decreased by 26%, despite increases in May–June precipitation over the past 35 years. Limited experimental work to date has explored plant responses produced by the interaction of changes in both temperature and precipitation, and of the existing studies, none have focused on the endangered bunchgrass ecosystem. Using a 2-year climate change manipulation experiment, we show that bunchgrass productivity increased with supplemental growing season precipitation, while warming alone exerted no significant effect. More importantly, the ratio of June precipitation to minimum temperature, a representation of the interaction of climate variables, predicted bunchgrass productivity better than either climate variable individually. This ratio acted as a surrogate index reflecting increased evapotranspiration with rising temperatures and thus better predicting soil moisture available for plant growth. Experimental warming over the summer led to significantly lower plant species richness and biodiversity, while increased precipitation, when applied over the entire summer, counteracted some of these declines. Warming also led to greater and more rapid plant senescence over the summer, resulting in greater litter production [an increase of 47.82 ± 17.82 (± SE) percentage points] and potential fire risk. Given the simultaneous changes in precipitation and temperature predicted for the next century, multi-factor experiments are essential to understand how ecosystems will respond to future climate scenarios.
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Acknowledgements
We thank J. Belovsky for help with project logistics, lab managers S. Szabo and R. Aguilera for their invaluable assistance, and B. Guidolin, M. Kipp, M. Houlahan, and A. Kloock for help in the field. We also thank John Pastor and one anonymous reviewer, whose comments greatly improved the manuscript. This work was funded by Notre Dame’s College of Science (Z.M. Volenec), the Glynn Family Honors Program (Z.M. Volenec), and NSF LTREB grants DEB0918306 and DEB1456511 (G.E. Belovsky). Data are available on request to the corresponding author.
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All authors designed the study. ZV carried out field work, lab analyses, and data analysis. GB provided input on data analysis. ZV wrote the first draft of the manuscript, and all authors contributed to subsequent revisions.
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Communicated by Bryan Foster.
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Volenec, Z.M., Belovsky, G.E. The interaction of temperature and precipitation determines productivity and diversity in a bunchgrass prairie ecosystem. Oecologia 188, 913–920 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-018-4247-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-018-4247-7