Nitrogen addition and mowing alter drought resistance and recovery of grassland communities

Nitrogen enrichment and land use are known to influence various ecosystems,but how these anthropogenic changes influence community and ecosystem responses to disturbance remains poorly understood.Here we investigated the effects of increased nitrogen input and mowing on the resistance and recovery of temperate semiarid grassland experiencing a three-year drought.Nitrogen addition increased grassland biomass recovery but decreased structural recovery after drought,whereas annual mowing increased grassland biomass recovery and structural recovery but reduced structural resistance to drought.The treatment effects on community biomass/structural resistance and recovery were largely modulated by the stability of the dominant species and asynchronous dynamics among species,and the community biomass resistance and recovery were also greatly driven by the stability of grasses.Community biomass resistance/recovery in response to drought was positively associated with its corresponding structural stability.Our study provides important experimental evidence that both nitrogen addition and mowing could substantially change grassland stability in both functional and structural aspects.Our findings emphasize the need to study changes across levels of ecological organization for a more complete understanding of ecosystem responses to disturbances under widespread environmental changes.

Autumn nitrogen enrichment destabilizes ecosystem biomass production in a semiarid grassland

Nitrogen(N)deposition decreases the temporal stability of ecosystem aboveground biomass production(ecosystem stability).However,little is known about how the responses of ecosystem stability differ based on seasonal N enrichment.By adding N in autumn,winter,or growing season,from October 2014 to May 2020,in a temperate grassland in northern China,we found that only N addition in autumn resulted in a significantly positive correlation between ecosystem mean aboveground net primary productivity(ANPP)and its standard deviation and significantly reduced ecosystem stability.Autumn N-induced reduction in ecosystem stability was associated with the vanished negative effect of community-wide species asynchrony(asynchronous dynamics among populations to environmental perturbations)on the standard deviation of ecosystem ANPP in combination with the emerged positive effect of dominance(Simpson's dominance index that indicates the relative weight of dominant species in a community).Our findings indicate that autumn N addition might overestimate the negative effect of annual atmospheric N deposition on ecosystem stability,suggesting that to better evaluate the influence of N deposition in temperate grasslands,both field experiments and global modeling should consider not only the annual N load but also its seasonal dynamics.Moreover,further studies should pay more attention to the alteration in the ecosystem temporal deviations,which might be more sensitive to human-induced environmental changes.