TY - JOUR
T1 - Middle-Eastern plant communities tolerate 9 years of drought in a multi-site climate manipulation experiment
AU - Tielbörger, Katja
AU - Bilton, Mark C.
AU - Metz, Johannes
AU - Kigel, Jaime
AU - Holzapfel, Claus
AU - Lebrija-Trejos, Edwin
AU - Konsens, Irit
AU - Parag, Hadas A.
AU - Sternberg, Marcelo
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - For evaluating climate change impacts on biodiversity, extensive experiments are urgently needed to complement popular non-mechanistic models which map future ecosystem properties onto their current climatic niche. Here, we experimentally test the main prediction of these models by means of a novel multi-site approach. We implement rainfall manipulations - irrigation and drought - to dryland plant communities situated along a steep climatic gradient in a global biodiversity hotspot containing many wild progenitors of crops. Despite the large extent of our study, spanning nine plant generations and many species, very few differences between treatments were observed in the vegetation response variables: biomass, species composition, species richness and density. The lack of a clear drought effect challenges studies classifying dryland ecosystems as most vulnerable to global change. We attribute this resistance to the tremendous temporal and spatial heterogeneity under which the plants have evolved, concluding that this should be accounted for when predicting future biodiversity change.
AB - For evaluating climate change impacts on biodiversity, extensive experiments are urgently needed to complement popular non-mechanistic models which map future ecosystem properties onto their current climatic niche. Here, we experimentally test the main prediction of these models by means of a novel multi-site approach. We implement rainfall manipulations - irrigation and drought - to dryland plant communities situated along a steep climatic gradient in a global biodiversity hotspot containing many wild progenitors of crops. Despite the large extent of our study, spanning nine plant generations and many species, very few differences between treatments were observed in the vegetation response variables: biomass, species composition, species richness and density. The lack of a clear drought effect challenges studies classifying dryland ecosystems as most vulnerable to global change. We attribute this resistance to the tremendous temporal and spatial heterogeneity under which the plants have evolved, concluding that this should be accounted for when predicting future biodiversity change.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84922988329&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/ncomms6102
DO - 10.1038/ncomms6102
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C2 - 25283495
AN - SCOPUS:84922988329
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 5
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
M1 - 5102
ER -