Recent advances in understanding grasslands.

Carly J Stevens

doi:10.12688/f1000research.15050.1

Abstract

Grasslands are a vitally important ecosystem, supporting a wide range of ecosystem services and high levels of biodiversity. As a consequence, they have long been a focus for ecologists, playing host to some of the world’s longest-running ecological experiments and providing the inspiration for many long-standing theories and debates. Because the field of grassland ecology is broad, encompassing many areas of ecology, this article picks some areas of particular debate and development to look at recent advances. The areas include relationships between diversity and productivity, ecosystem stability and ecosystem service provision, global change threats from nutrient addition, invasive species, climate change, and plant soil interactions.

Highlights

Grasslands cover 40% of the world’s terrestrial surface[1], and they are found on all continents except Antarctica, in a wide range of climates, and on a wide range of soil types
Whilst others must be maintained by active management such as cutting or grazing. They are incredibly important to mankind, providing many different services. Given their importance, extent, and variation, grasslands have been a focus for many ecologists and the home of many ecological theories, some of which remain intensely debated
I will highlight some of the recent advances in understanding grasslands

Summary

Introduction

Grasslands cover 40% of the world’s terrestrial surface[1], and they are found on all continents except Antarctica, in a wide range of climates, and on a wide range of soil types. Fraser et al.[6] collected data from 30 sites on six continents and performed a similar analysis to that employed by Adler et al.[5] They found strong support for the humpbacked model, with 19 of 28 sites showing significant concave-down quadratic relationships between plant species richness and productivity[6]. Allan et al.[27] provided strong evidence to support this, using 150 grassland plots spread across three regions of Germany as part of the Biodiversity Exploratories experiment Their results show that diversity loss and functional composition change, caused by land-use intensification, is just as important as the land-use intensification itself in terms of its impact on ecosystem service delivery. This was true for cultural and regulating services[29] and for the provision of multiple ecosystem services[30]

Conclusions

Tilman D

Findings

29. Millenium Ecosystem Assessment: Ecosystems and Human Well-being