Six-year removal of co-dominant grasses alleviated competitive pressure on subdominant grasses but dominant shrub removal had neutral effects in a subalpine ecosystem

	Six-year removal of co-dominant grasses alleviated competitive pressure on subdominant grasses but dominant shrub removal had neutral effects in a subalpine ecosystem
	Li, Wenjin; Knops, Johannes M. H.; Png, G. Kenny; Yan, Xi; Dong, Huan; Li, Jinhua; Zhou, Huakun; Sierra, Ruben Diaz
刊名	GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION
	2020
卷号	23
关键词	Stress-gradient hypothesis Removal experiments Plant functional type Competition and facilitation Grassland Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau
英文摘要	The 'stress-gradient hypothesis' predicts increasing facilitative interactions with increasing environmental stress, but it remains unclear if the prevailing type of interaction (i.e. facilitative or competitive) between dominant and subordinate plant species occurring in harsh environments is dependent on the plant functional type. In addition, most plant -species removal experiments in grasslands are short-term (1e2 years), which may imprecisely reflect transient effects arising from methodological limitations. We conducted a dominant species removal experiment in a subalpine ecosystem, containing a mosaic of grass-dominated and shrub-dominated community patches, both of which are common in the subalpine zone of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. We examined the direction and magnitude of the effects of three co-dominant grass and a dominant shrub species on subordinate species richness and biomass over a 6-year period. Removal of the dominant grass species alleviated their competitive pressure on subdominant grasses, which resulted in similar total and grass biomass detected in the final year of the study. By contrast, shrub removal showed no effects on its subordinate species biomass. Furthermore, neither the removal of the dominant shrubs nor the grasses altered their respective subordinate species richness. Thus, in subalpine ecosystems that experience harsh environmental conditions, our results showed that the direction of interactive effects of dominant plant species on subordinate species may be dependent on the plant functional type and are not necessarily facilitative. Furthermore, we showed that longer-term plant-removal experi-ment observations may be required to better determine the effects of species removal for this subalpine and other montane ecosystem(s). (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.
内容类型	期刊论文
源URL	[http://210.75.249.4/handle/363003/60264]
专题	西北高原生物研究所_中国科学院西北高原生物研究所
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Li, Wenjin,Knops, Johannes M. H.,Png, G. Kenny,et al. Six-year removal of co-dominant grasses alleviated competitive pressure on subdominant grasses but dominant shrub removal had neutral effects in a subalpine ecosystem[J]. GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION,2020,23.
APA	Li, Wenjin.,Knops, Johannes M. H..,Png, G. Kenny.,Yan, Xi.,Dong, Huan.,...&Sierra, Ruben Diaz.(2020).Six-year removal of co-dominant grasses alleviated competitive pressure on subdominant grasses but dominant shrub removal had neutral effects in a subalpine ecosystem.GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION,23.
MLA	Li, Wenjin,et al."Six-year removal of co-dominant grasses alleviated competitive pressure on subdominant grasses but dominant shrub removal had neutral effects in a subalpine ecosystem".GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION 23(2020).