Abstract
Global climate change is affecting and will continue to affect ecosystems worldwide. Specifically, temperature and precipitation are both expected to shift globally, and their separate and interactive effects will likely affect ecosystems differentially depending on current temperature, precipitation regimes, and other biotic and environmental factors. It is not currently understood how the effects of increasing temperature on plant communities may depend on either precipitation or where communities lie on soil moisture gradients. Such knowledge would play a crucial role in increasing our predictive ability for future effects of climate change in different systems. To this end, we conducted a multi‐factor global change experiment at two locations, differing in temperature, moisture, aspect, and plant community composition, on the same slope in the northern Mongolian steppe. The natural differences in temperature and moisture between locations served as a point of comparison for the experimental manipulations of temperature and precipitation. We conducted two separate experiments, one examining the effect of climate manipulation via open‐top chambers (OTCs) across the two different slope locations, the other a factorial OTC by watering experiment at one of the two locations. By combining these experiments, we were able to assess how OTCs impact plant productivity and diversity across a natural and manipulated range of soil moisture. We found that warming effects were context dependent, with the greatest negative impacts of warming on diversity in the warmer, drier upper slope location and in the unwatered plots. Our study is an important step in understanding how global change will affect ecosystems across multiple scales and locations.
Highlights
Major climatic shifts in temperature and precipitation will continue to affect the ecology of natural systems worldwide
Because temperature and precipitation are not expected to change in parallel, discerning the ecological consequences of climate change will require understanding the consequences of elevated temperature at different levels of soil moisture or precipitation
We examined the factorial combinations of climate manipulation (OTC vs. control) and slope location in order to determine if the effects of climate manipulation differed within a landscape
Summary
Major climatic shifts in temperature and precipitation will continue to affect the ecology of natural systems worldwide. We currently do not fully understand the interactive impacts of warming and precipitation changes on ecosystems nor do we understand how the consequences of increased temperature may differ depending on soil moisture status, due to this high level of coupling. Comparisons of disparate manipulative climate experiments across regional and global temperature gradients or across precipitation gradients provide evidence that the impact of changes in temperature on productivity depends on soil moisture (Wu, Dijkstra, Koch, Penuelas, & Hungate, 2011; Elmendorf et al, 2011, 2012). Our goal was to understand how predicted changes in temperature will interact with predicted changes in precipitation (Bayasgalan et al, 2009) and natural variation in soil moisture to affect ecosystems Using both simulated precipitation shifts and multiple locations, we increase our ability to understand the context dependency of temperature impacts. We further hypothesized that additional precipitation could moderate much of the negative impact of the OTC
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