ALBERT

Description: A transect of 68 acid grasslands across Great Britain, covering the lower range of ambient annual nitrogen deposition in the industrialized world (5 to 35 kg Nha-1 year-1), indicates that long-term, chronic nitrogen deposition has significantly reduced plant species richness. Species richness declines as a linear function of the rate of inorganic nitrogen deposition, with a reduction of one species per 4-m2 quadrat for every 2.5 kg Nha-1 year-1 of chronic nitrogen deposition. Species adapted to infertile conditions are systematically reduced at high nitrogen deposition. At the mean chronic nitrogen deposition rate of central Europe (17 kg Nha-1 year-1), there is a 23% species reduction compared with grasslands receiving the lowest levels of nitrogen deposition.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Stevens, Carly J -- Dise, Nancy B -- Mountford, J Owen -- Gowing, David J -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2004 Mar 19;303(5665):1876-9.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Earth Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK. c.j.stevens@open.ac.uk〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15031507" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉

Description: Human alterations to nutrient cycles and herbivore communities are affecting global biodiversity dramatically. Ecological theory predicts these changes should be strongly counteractive: nutrient addition drives plant species loss through intensified competition for light, whereas herbivores prevent competitive exclusion by increasing ground-level light, particularly in productive systems. Here we use experimental data spanning a globally relevant range of conditions to test the hypothesis that herbaceous plant species losses caused by eutrophication may be offset by increased light availability due to herbivory. This experiment, replicated in 40 grasslands on 6 continents, demonstrates that nutrients and herbivores can serve as counteracting forces to control local plant diversity through light limitation, independent of site productivity, soil nitrogen, herbivore type and climate. Nutrient addition consistently reduced local diversity through light limitation, and herbivory rescued diversity at sites where it alleviated light limitation. Thus, species loss from anthropogenic eutrophication can be ameliorated in grasslands where herbivory increases ground-level light.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Borer, Elizabeth T -- Seabloom, Eric W -- Gruner, Daniel S -- Harpole, W Stanley -- Hillebrand, Helmut -- Lind, Eric M -- Adler, Peter B -- Alberti, Juan -- Anderson, T Michael -- Bakker, Jonathan D -- Biederman, Lori -- Blumenthal, Dana -- Brown, Cynthia S -- Brudvig, Lars A -- Buckley, Yvonne M -- Cadotte, Marc -- Chu, Chengjin -- Cleland, Elsa E -- Crawley, Michael J -- Daleo, Pedro -- Damschen, Ellen I -- Davies, Kendi F -- DeCrappeo, Nicole M -- Du, Guozhen -- Firn, Jennifer -- Hautier, Yann -- Heckman, Robert W -- Hector, Andy -- HilleRisLambers, Janneke -- Iribarne, Oscar -- Klein, Julia A -- Knops, Johannes M H -- La Pierre, Kimberly J -- Leakey, Andrew D B -- Li, Wei -- MacDougall, Andrew S -- McCulley, Rebecca L -- Melbourne, Brett A -- Mitchell, Charles E -- Moore, Joslin L -- Mortensen, Brent -- O'Halloran, Lydia R -- Orrock, John L -- Pascual, Jesus -- Prober, Suzanne M -- Pyke, David A -- Risch, Anita C -- Schuetz, Martin -- Smith, Melinda D -- Stevens, Carly J -- Sullivan, Lauren L -- Williams, Ryan J -- Wragg, Peter D -- Wright, Justin P -- Yang, Louie H -- England -- Nature. 2014 Apr 24;508(7497):517-20. doi: 10.1038/nature13144. Epub 2014 Mar 9.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St Paul, Minnesota 55108, USA. ; Department of Entomology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA. ; Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA. ; Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, Carl-von- Ossietzky University, 26382 Wilhelmshaven, Oldenburg, Germany. ; Department of Wildland Resources and the Ecology Center, Utah State University, Logan, Utah 84322, USA. ; Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras (IIMyC), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas (CONICET), Mar del Plata 7600 , Argentina. ; Department of Biology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27109, USA. ; School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA. ; Agricultural Research Service (ARS), United States Department of Agriculture, Fort Collins, Colorado 80526, USA. ; Deptartment of Forest, Rangeland and Watershed Stewardship, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523, USA. ; Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, USA. ; 1] ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Queensland 4072, Australia [2] School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland. ; Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto Scarborough, Ontario M1C 1A4, Canada. ; State Key Laboratory of Grassland and Agro-Ecosystems, Research Station of Alpine Meadow and Wetland Ecosystems, School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000 Gansu, China. ; Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, California 92093, USA. ; Department of Biology, Imperial College at Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK. ; Department of Zoology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA. ; Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder Colorado 80309, USA. ; US Geological Survey, Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA. ; Queensland University of Technology, Biogeosciences, Brisbane, Queensland 4001, Australia. ; Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, USA. ; Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3RB, UK. ; School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska 68588, USA. ; Berkeley Initiative for Global Change Biology, University of California, Berkeley 94704, USA. ; Department of Plant Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, llinois 61820, USA. ; Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada. ; Department of Plant & Soil Sciences, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40546, USA. ; Australian Research Center for Urban Ecology, c/o School of Botany, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia, and School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. ; Department of Zoology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA. ; CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Wembley, West Australia 6913, Australia. ; Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf 8903, Switzerland. ; Lancaster Environment Center, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YQ, UK. ; Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA. ; Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24670649" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉

Description: Studies of experimental grassland communities have demonstrated that plant diversity can stabilize productivity through species asynchrony, in which decreases in the biomass of some species are compensated for by increases in others. However, it remains unknown whether these findings are relevant to natural ecosystems, especially those for which species diversity is threatened by anthropogenic global change. Here we analyse diversity-stability relationships from 41 grasslands on five continents and examine how these relationships are affected by chronic fertilization, one of the strongest drivers of species loss globally. Unmanipulated communities with more species had greater species asynchrony, resulting in more stable biomass production, generalizing a result from biodiversity experiments to real-world grasslands. However, fertilization weakened the positive effect of diversity on stability. Contrary to expectations, this was not due to species loss after eutrophication but rather to an increase in the temporal variation of productivity in combination with a decrease in species asynchrony in diverse communities. Our results demonstrate separate and synergistic effects of diversity and eutrophication on stability, emphasizing the need to understand how drivers of global change interactively affect the reliable provisioning of ecosystem services in real-world systems.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Hautier, Yann -- Seabloom, Eric W -- Borer, Elizabeth T -- Adler, Peter B -- Harpole, W Stanley -- Hillebrand, Helmut -- Lind, Eric M -- MacDougall, Andrew S -- Stevens, Carly J -- Bakker, Jonathan D -- Buckley, Yvonne M -- Chu, Chengjin -- Collins, Scott L -- Daleo, Pedro -- Damschen, Ellen I -- Davies, Kendi F -- Fay, Philip A -- Firn, Jennifer -- Gruner, Daniel S -- Jin, Virginia L -- Klein, Julia A -- Knops, Johannes M H -- La Pierre, Kimberly J -- Li, Wei -- McCulley, Rebecca L -- Melbourne, Brett A -- Moore, Joslin L -- O'Halloran, Lydia R -- Prober, Suzanne M -- Risch, Anita C -- Sankaran, Mahesh -- Schuetz, Martin -- Hector, Andy -- England -- Nature. 2014 Apr 24;508(7497):521-5. doi: 10.1038/nature13014. Epub 2014 Feb 16.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉1] Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St Paul, Minnesota 55108, USA [2] Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland. ; Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St Paul, Minnesota 55108, USA. ; Department of Wildland Resources and the Ecology Center, Utah State University, Logan, Utah 84322, USA. ; Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA. ; Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, Carl-von-Ossietzky University Oldenburg, D-26111 Oldenburg, Germany. ; Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada. ; Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YQ, UK. ; School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA. ; 1] Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Queensland 4072, Australia [2] School of Natural Sciences, Department of Zoology, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland. ; State Key Laboratory of Grassland and Agro-Ecosystems, Research Station of Alpine Meadow and Wetland Ecosystems, School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China. ; Department of Biology, MSC03-2020, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131, USA. ; Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras (IIMyC) (CONICET-UNMdP), Mar del Plata 7600, Argentina. ; Department of Zoology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA. ; Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA. ; United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service, Grassland Soil and Water Research Lab, Temple, Texas 76502, USA. ; Queensland University of Technology, School of Biological Sciences, Brisbane 4000, Australia. ; Department of Entomology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA. ; United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service, Agroecosystem Management Research Unit, Lincoln, Nebraska 68583, USA. ; Department of Forest, Rangeland and Watershed Stewardship, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523, USA. ; School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska 68588, USA. ; Berkeley Initiative for Global Change Biology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. ; Yunnan Academy of Biodiversity, Southwest Forestry University, Kunming 650224, China. ; Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40546, USA. ; 1] Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology, Melbourne, c/o School of Botany, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia [2] School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. ; Department of Zoology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA. ; CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Wembley, WA 6913, Australia. ; Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, 8903 Birmensdorf, Switzerland. ; 1] School of Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK [2] National Centre for Biological Sciences, GKVK Campus, Bangalore 560065, India. ; Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3RB, UK.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24531763" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉

Description: For more than 30 years, the relationship between net primary productivity and species richness has generated intense debate in ecology about the processes regulating local diversity. The original view, which is still widely accepted, holds that the relationship is hump-shaped, with richness first rising and then declining with increasing productivity. Although recent meta-analyses questioned the generality of hump-shaped patterns, these syntheses have been criticized for failing to account for methodological differences among studies. We addressed such concerns by conducting standardized sampling in 48 herbaceous-dominated plant communities on five continents. We found no clear relationship between productivity and fine-scale (meters(-2)) richness within sites, within regions, or across the globe. Ecologists should focus on fresh, mechanistic approaches to understanding the multivariate links between productivity and richness.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Adler, Peter B -- Seabloom, Eric W -- Borer, Elizabeth T -- Hillebrand, Helmut -- Hautier, Yann -- Hector, Andy -- Harpole, W Stanley -- O'Halloran, Lydia R -- Grace, James B -- Anderson, T Michael -- Bakker, Jonathan D -- Biederman, Lori A -- Brown, Cynthia S -- Buckley, Yvonne M -- Calabrese, Laura B -- Chu, Cheng-Jin -- Cleland, Elsa E -- Collins, Scott L -- Cottingham, Kathryn L -- Crawley, Michael J -- Damschen, Ellen I -- Davies, Kendi F -- DeCrappeo, Nicole M -- Fay, Philip A -- Firn, Jennifer -- Frater, Paul -- Gasarch, Eve I -- Gruner, Daniel S -- Hagenah, Nicole -- Hille Ris Lambers, Janneke -- Humphries, Hope -- Jin, Virginia L -- Kay, Adam D -- Kirkman, Kevin P -- Klein, Julia A -- Knops, Johannes M H -- La Pierre, Kimberly J -- Lambrinos, John G -- Li, Wei -- MacDougall, Andrew S -- McCulley, Rebecca L -- Melbourne, Brett A -- Mitchell, Charles E -- Moore, Joslin L -- Morgan, John W -- Mortensen, Brent -- Orrock, John L -- Prober, Suzanne M -- Pyke, David A -- Risch, Anita C -- Schuetz, Martin -- Smith, Melinda D -- Stevens, Carly J -- Sullivan, Lauren L -- Wang, Gang -- Wragg, Peter D -- Wright, Justin P -- Yang, Louie H -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2011 Sep 23;333(6050):1750-3. doi: 10.1126/science.1204498.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Wildland Resources and the Ecology Center, Utah State University, 5230 Old Main, Logan, UT 84322, USA. peter.adler@usu.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21940895" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉