Plenary and Invited Papers Section 2: Grassland & the Environment
Description
Key points
1. Experimental manipulations of plant species diversity in unfertilised prairies and meadows has revealed that increasing diversity often leads to increased productivity (range of observed relationships varies from flat to log-linearly positive); driven by a combination of facilitation, niche-partitioning and sampling/selection effects.
2. The longer-term effects of diversity on ecosystem stability are not as clear and in need of further work.
3. Recent applied work, and a new review of the grassland literature, both show the potential for biodiversity to increase productivity under realistic field conditions.
4. The longer-term feedback of grazers on biodiversity gradients is unknown, and grassland biodiversity experiments that incorporate grazers will be needed to test whether patterns differ from those seen in ungrazed prairies and meadows.
5. The relationship between diversity and productivity seen in local experiments is often different from regional-scale correlations, and the scaling-up of experimental results remains a research priority.
Included in
Relationships between Biodiversity and Production in Grasslands at Local and Regional Scales
Key points
1. Experimental manipulations of plant species diversity in unfertilised prairies and meadows has revealed that increasing diversity often leads to increased productivity (range of observed relationships varies from flat to log-linearly positive); driven by a combination of facilitation, niche-partitioning and sampling/selection effects.
2. The longer-term effects of diversity on ecosystem stability are not as clear and in need of further work.
3. Recent applied work, and a new review of the grassland literature, both show the potential for biodiversity to increase productivity under realistic field conditions.
4. The longer-term feedback of grazers on biodiversity gradients is unknown, and grassland biodiversity experiments that incorporate grazers will be needed to test whether patterns differ from those seen in ungrazed prairies and meadows.
5. The relationship between diversity and productivity seen in local experiments is often different from regional-scale correlations, and the scaling-up of experimental results remains a research priority.
