Abstract
Diversity of species and order of arrival can have strong effects on ecosystem functioning and community composition, but these two have rarely been explicitly combined in experimental setups. We measured the effects of both species diversity and order of arrival on ecosystem function and community composition in a grassland field experiment, thus combining biodiversity and assembly approaches. We studied the effect of order of arrival of three plant functional groups (PFGs: grasses, legumes, and non-leguminous forbs) and of sowing low and high diversity seed mixtures (9 or 21 species) on species composition and aboveground biomass. The experiment was set up in two different soil types. Differences in PFG order of arrival affected the biomass, the number of species and community composition. As expected, we found higher aboveground biomass when sowing legumes before the other PFGs, but this effect was not continuous over time. We did not find a positive effect of sown diversity on aboveground biomass (even if it influenced species richness as expected). No interaction were found between the two studied factors. We found that sowing legumes first may be a good method for increasing productivity whilst maintaining diversity of central European grasslands, although the potential for long-lasting effects needs further study. In addition, the mechanisms behind the non-continuous priority effects we found need to be further researched, taking weather and plant-soil feedbacks into account.
Highlights
In ecology, the topics of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (Balvanera et al, 2006; Isbell et al, 2011) and community assembly (Diamond, 1975; Fukami and Nakajima, 2011) are key components of the field, but have rarely being explicitly combined in experimental setups
We were explicitly interested in how sown diversity and order of arrival affected the biomass over time, we analyzed the effects of plant functional groups (PFGs) order arrival (Figure 2) and sown diversity (Figure 3) on aboveground biomass separately for each year and each soil type
We found a transient significant effect of PFG order of arrival over the 4 years on aboveground biomass, number of species, and species composition
Summary
The topics of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (Balvanera et al, 2006; Isbell et al, 2011) and community assembly (Diamond, 1975; Fukami and Nakajima, 2011) are key components of the field, but have rarely being explicitly combined in experimental setups. Since ecological communities are not static over time, understanding plant community assembly and how species can drive assembly has long been a primary goal for ecologists (Diamond, 1975; Connell and Slatyer, 1977) Within this context, the issue of historical contingency (dependence on history) is central, and involves the study of the effects of past events, whether biotic or abiotic (Drake, 1991; Eriksson and Eriksson, 1998; Fukami, 2015). For example, may be useful for sending plant communities on desired trajectories for restoration
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