Speaker
Description
A better understanding of how climate change affects the stability of grassland biomass production is important to ensure future ecosystem functioning. Since 2015, data on grassland biomass production have been collected in the Global Change Experimental Facility (GCEF) – a large field experiment in Bad Lauchstädt (Saxony-Anhalt, Germany) with different land use types under future and ambient climate treatment. We divided the biomass data time series of the species-rich extensively used meadows into overlapping time windows of three years to capture short-term variations in community biomass stability. For each time window, we determined the temporal stability of the community biomass production (inverse of the coefficient of variation) and different potential biotic stability mechanisms such as species asynchrony, species diversity, and temporal stability of common species biomass production. In addition, we identified extreme dry years and quantified the resistance and recovery of community biomass production. After an establishment period of a few years, grassland community biomass production of the spring harvest tended to be less stable under future climate treatment compared to ambient climate treatment. This might be due to tendencies towards more synchronous species dynamics and lower stability of common species biomass production under future climate treatment in comparison to ambient climate treatment. In the year after the two extreme dry years (2018 and 2019), community biomass production (relative to the mean community biomass production of normal years) was significantly lower under future climate treatment than under ambient climate treatment.
| Status Group | Doctoral Researcher |
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