Journal article
Species origin affects the rate of response to inter-annual growing season precipitation and nutrient addition in four Australian native grasslands
JW Morgan, JM Dwyer, JN Price, SM Prober, SA Power, J Firn, JL Moore, GM Wardle, EW Seabloom, ET Borer, JS Camac
Journal of Vegetation Science | WILEY | Published : 2016
DOI: 10.1111/jvs.12450
Abstract
Questions: Predicted increases in temperature and changes to precipitation are expected to alter the amount of plant available nutrients, in turn, altering rates of primary production and exotic plant invasions. However, it remains unclear whether increased responses occur in wetter than average years, even in low fertility and low rainfall regions. Location: Four Australian grasslands, including sites in arid Western Australia, semi-arid Victoria, alpine Victoria and sub-tropical Queensland. Methods: Using identical nutrient addition experiments, we use 6-years of biomass, cover and species richness data to examine how rates of biomass production and native and exotic cover and richness are..
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Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
This work was generated using data from the Nutrient Network (http://www.nutnet.org) experiment, funded at the site scale by individual researchers. Co-ordination and data management have been supported by funding to E. Borer and E. Seabloom from the National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network (NSF-DEB-1042132), Long Term Ecological Research (NSF-DEB-1234162 to Cedar Creek LTER) programmes, and the Institute on the Environment (DG-0001-13). We also thank the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute for hosting project data. The Great Western Woodlands Supersite of Australia's Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network provided support for the Mt Caroline site. J Price was supported by the Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions. Bob Parsons, Pete Vesk and two anonymous reviewers helped improve the manuscript.