Abstract
Anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a critical environmental problem, prompting frequent investigations into its consequences for various ecological systems. Few studies, however, have explored the effect of climate change on ecological stability and the underlying mechanisms. We conduct a field experiment to assess the influence of warming and altered precipitation on the temporal stability of plant community biomass in an alpine grassland located on the Tibetan Plateau. We find that whereas precipitation alteration does not influence biomass temporal stability, warming lowers stability through reducing the degree of species asynchrony. Importantly, biomass temporal stability is not influenced by plant species diversity, but is largely determined by the temporal stability of dominant species and asynchronous population dynamics among the coexisting species. Our findings suggest that ongoing and future climate change may alter stability properties of ecological communities, potentially hindering their ability to provide ecosystem services for humanity.
Highlights
Anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a critical environmental problem, prompting frequent investigations into its consequences for various ecological systems
Since stable ecosystems are important for providing sustainable ecosystem functioning and services to humanity[3], understanding the drivers of ecological stability has emerged as a pressing issue in a period when many ecosystems are experiencing significant anthropogenic change[4,5,6,7]
We report on a 5-year field experiment investigating the influence of climate warming and altered precipitation on the temporal stability of plant biomass production of an alpine grassland on the Tibetan Plateau (Supplementary Fig. 1)
Summary
Anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a critical environmental problem, prompting frequent investigations into its consequences for various ecological systems. The effects of climate warming and altered precipitation on community properties, including stability, may not be independent of each other, given that warming is expected to impose its strongest effect under drought conditions[33,36,37] Studies manipulating both warming and precipitation to assess their influence on community biomass stability are vital for predicting ecosystem dynamics under future climate change scenarios. We show that climate warming reduces the temporal stability of community biomass via reducing the degree of species asynchrony, independent of precipitation effects This result suggests that ongoing and future climate change may reduce the ability of the alpine grassland and other similar ecosystems to provide reliable ecosystem services for humanity
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