Disturbance alters transience but nutrients determine equilibria during grassland succession with multiple global change drivers.

Disturbance and environmental change may cause communities to converge on a steady state, diverge towards multiple alternative states or remain in long-term transience. Yet, empirical investigations of successional trajectories are rare, especially in systems experiencing multiple concurrent anthropogenic drivers of change. We examined succession in old field grassland communities subjected to disturbance and nitrogen fertilization using data from a long-term (22-year) experiment.