Abstract
Fertilization and grazing are two common anthropogenic disturbances that can lead to unprecedented changes in biodiversity and ecological stability of grassland ecosystems. A few studies, however, have explored the effects of fertilization and grazing on community stability and the underlying mechanisms. We conducted a six-year field experiment to assess the influence of nitrogen (N) fertilization and grazing on the community stability in a long-term enclosure and grazing grassland ecosystems on the Loess Plateau. A structural equation modeling method was used to evaluate how fertilization and grazing altered community stability. Our results indicated that the community stability decreased in the enclosure and grazing grassland ecosystems with the addition of N. The community stability began to decline significantly at 4.68 and 9.36 N g m−2 year−1 for the grazing and enclosure grassland ecosystems, respectively. We also found that the addition of N reduced the community stability through decreasing species richness, but a long-term enclosure can alleviate its negative effect. Overall, species diversity can be a useful predictor of the stability of ecosystems confronted with disturbances. Also, our results showed that long-term enclosure was an effective grassland management practice to ensure community stability on the Loess Plateau of China.
Highlights
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.license.Community stability refers to the ability of a community to maintain species compositions and productivity over time, and to recover former levels of productivity or species compositions after a disturbance [1]
Species richness with community stability consistently declined duringecosystems, the course and of this decline was accelerated by. These results indicate that the reduced community the six-year experiment in the enclosure and grazing grassland ecosystems, and this decline stability in our study was possibly associated with reduced species diversity
Our results showed that grazing had negative effects on the community stability and N addition enhanced the negative effects of grazing on the community stability in the grassland ecosystem
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Community stability refers to the ability of a community to maintain species compositions and productivity over time, and to recover former levels of productivity or species compositions after a disturbance [1]. The community stability of grassland ecosystems can be perturbed by several natural and anthropogenic causes [2]. Grazing and fertilization are the most common anthropogenic disturbances that can lead to alterations in biodiversity and community stability in grassland ecosystems [3,4]. Some studies found that community stability decreased with increasing the level of N fertilization [1,4,6], but a few other studies found that long-term N fertilization increased community stability via enhancing species dominance [7]. Grazing has been found to decrease community stability [8,9], while long-term enclosure can facilitate vegetation recovery and increase plant productivity [10].
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
