Abstract
Phosphorus (P) limitation of aboveground plant production is usually assumed to occur in tropical regions but rarely elsewhere. Here we report that such P limitation is more widespread and much stronger than previously estimated. In our global meta-analysis, almost half (46.2%) of 652 P-addition field experiments reveal a significant P limitation on aboveground plant production. Globally, P additions increase aboveground plant production by 34.9% in natural terrestrial ecosystems, which is 7.0–15.9% higher than previously suggested. In croplands, by contrast, P additions increase aboveground plant production by only 13.9%, probably because of historical fertilizations. The magnitude of P limitation also differs among climate zones and regions, and is driven by climate, ecosystem properties, and fertilization regimes. In addition to confirming that P limitation is widespread in tropical regions, our study demonstrates that P limitation often occurs in other regions. This suggests that previous studies have underestimated the importance of altered P supply on aboveground plant production in natural terrestrial ecosystems.
Highlights
Phosphorus (P) limitation of aboveground plant production is usually assumed to occur in tropical regions but rarely elsewhere
Our synthesis revealed that P The magnitude of P limitation
To compare our meta-analysis with three other previous metaanalyses[1,8,9], we calculated the magnitude of P limitation in the natural terrestrial ecosystems by weighting the Ln(RR) uniformly or by weighting the RR with the inverse variance
Summary
The magnitude of P limitation in the natural terrestrial ecosystems was even larger after the Ln(RR) was weighted by the quantity of P added (40.5%) or experimental duration (48.4%) (Table 1). The experiments in Augusto et al.[8] were spread quite evenly over the global land surface (Supplementary Fig. 1c) Their relatively low estimates might be partly explained by their use of a slightly different way (relative to our study) to remove pseudo-replications, i.e., the latest measurement for forests but the earliest measurement for other ecosystems. All of the previous syntheses had a much smaller sample size (Table 1) and a relatively poorer representation of global natural terrestrial ecosystems than our study The pattern holds true for most continents and climate zones (Fig. 3), under all fertilization regimes (Fig. 3), on all types of soils (Supplementary Fig. 7), and for all meta-analytic methods
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