Search

Livestock farmers rely on a high and stable grassland productivity for fodder production to sustain their livelihoods. Future drought events related to climate change, however, threaten grassland functionality in many regions across the globe. The introduction of sustainable grassland management could buffer these negative effects. According to the biodiversity–productivity hypothesis, productivity positively associates with local biodiversity. The biodiversity–insurance hypothesis states that higher biodiversity enhances the temporal stability of productivity. To date, these hypotheses have mostly been tested through experimental studies under restricted environmental conditions, hereby neglecting climatic variations at a landscape‐scale. Here, we provide a landscape‐scale assessment of the contribution of species richness, functional composition, temperature, and precipitation on grassland productivity. We found that the variation in grassland productivity during the growing season was best explained by functional trait composition. The community mean of plant preference for nutrients explained 24.8% of the variation in productivity and the community mean of specific leaf area explained 18.6%, while species richness explained only 2.4%. Temperature and precipitation explained an additional 22.1% of the variation in productivity. Our results indicate that functional trait composition is an important predictor of landscape‐scale grassland productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Rapid climatic changes and increasing human influence at high elevations around the world will have profound impacts on mountain biodiversity. However, forecasts from statistical models (e.g. species distribution models) rarely consider that plant community changes could substantially lag behind climatic changes, hindering our ability to make temporally realistic projections for the coming century. Indeed, the magnitudes of lags, and the relative importance of the different factors giving rise to them, remain poorly understood. We review evidence for three types of lag: “dispersal lags” affecting plant species’ spread along elevational gradients, “establishment lags” following their arrival in recipient communities, and “extinction lags” of resident species. Variation in lags is explained by variation among species in physiological and demographic responses, by effects of altered biotic interactions, and by aspects of the physical environment. Of these, altered biotic interactions could contribute substantially to establishment and extinction lags, yet impacts of biotic interactions on range dynamics are poorly understood. We develop a mechanistic community model to illustrate how species turnover in future communities might lag behind simple expectations based on species’ range shifts with unlimited dispersal. The model shows a combined contribution of altered biotic interactions and dispersal lags to plant community turnover along an elevational gradient following climate warming. Our review and simulation support the view that accounting for disequilibrium range dynamics will be essential for realistic forecasts of patterns of biodiversity under climate change, with implications for the conservation of mountain species and the ecosystem functions they provide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assembly of grassland communities has long been scrutinized through the lens of functional diversity. Studies generally point to an overwhelming influence of climate on observed patterns of functional diversity, despite experimental evidence demonstrating the importance of biotic interactions. We postulate that this is because most observational studies neglect both scale dependencies of assembly processes and phenotypic variation between individuals. Here, we test for changes in the importance of abiotic filtering and biotic interactions along a stress gradient by explicitly accounting for different scales. In addition to quantifying intraspecific trait variability (ITV), we also vary the two components of spatial scale, including grain (i.e. community size) and extent (i.e. the geographical area that defines the species pool)., We sampled 20 grassland communities in ten sites distributed along a 975-m elevation gradient. At each site, we measured seven functional traits for a total of 2020 individuals at different spatial grains. We related community functional diversity metrics to the main environmental gradient of our study area, growing season length (GSL), and assessed the dependence of these relationships on spatial grain, spatial extent and ITV., At large spatial grain and extent, the imprint of environmental filtering on functional diversity became more important with increasing stress (i.e. functional diversity decreased with shorter GSL). At small spatial grain and extent, we found a convex relationship between functional diversity and GSL congruent with the hypothesis that competition is dominant at low-stress levels while facilitative interactions are dominant at high-stress levels (i.e. high functional diversity at both extremes of the stress gradient). Importantly, the effect of intraspecific variability on assembly rules was noticeable only at small spatial grain and extent., Synthesis. Our study reveals how the combination of abiotic stress and biotic interactions shapes the functional diversity of alpine grasslands at different spatial scales, and highlights the importance of phenotype variation between individuals for community assembly processes at fine spatial scale. Our results suggest that studies analysing trait-based assembly rules but ignoring ITV and focusing on a single spatial scale are likely to miss essential features of community diversity patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Climate change is expected to modify current ecological conditions sustaining the coexistence of species within cold‐adapted plant communities. It will primarily act upon the existing structure of communities, whose response should depend on the functional differences governing coexistence among alpine species. We postulated that a possible trade‐off between (1) plant growth in response to temperature, (2) plant competition and (3) resistance to herbivory, modulates the rate of plant community turnover under climate change. We reviewed the literature investigating functional traits variability within communities along elevation gradients. Despite environmental filtering, our review indicates that interspecific plant functional variation within communities does not necessarily decrease with elevation. While the diversity of traits related to abiotic affinities or competition are well documented, the variability in species resistance to herbivory within communities is poorly known. Using a Lotka–Volterra‐based model, we simulated the impact of climate change on plant communities through (1) a direct effect on plant growth and competition and (2) an indirect effect via an increase in herbivore pressure. We showed that different shapes of trade‐offs between temperature‐related growth, competition and resistance to herbivory modulate community turnover under climate change. We documented the existence of two independent trade‐offs axes using a detailed dataset of functional traits within two alpine grasslands in the European Alps. Plant competitive traits (i.e. leaf area and height) where negatively associated to cold tolerance, whereas traits of the leaf economic spectrum were associated to traits related to the physical resistance to herbivory. We propose that the immediate effect of climate change on alpine plant communities will depend on existing functional variability and how functional axes trade‐off with each other. Documenting ecological constraints between plant functional axes should provide indications to anticipate winners and losers in alpine plant communities. A plain language summary is available for this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]