Increasing photosynthetic benefit with decreasing irrigation frequency in an Australian temperate pasture exposed to elevated carbon dioxide.

Elevated atmospheric CO2 (e[CO2]) often enhances plant photosynthesis and improves water status. However, the effects of e[CO2] vary significantly and are believed to be influenced by water availability. With the future warmer climate expected to increase the frequency and severity of extreme rainfall, the response of plants to e[CO2] under changing precipitation patterns remains uncertain.

Multifunctional redundancy: Impossible or undetected?

The diversity-functioning relationship is a pillar of ecology. Two significant concepts have emerged from this relationship: redundancy, the asymptotic relationship between diversity and functioning, and multifunctionality, a monotonic relationship between diversity and multiple functions occurring simultaneously. However, multifunctional redundancy, an asymptotic relationship between diversity and multiple functions occurring simultaneously, is rarely detected in research.

The great escape: patterns of enemy release are not explained by time, space or climate.

When a plant is introduced to a new ecosystem it may escape from some of its coevolved herbivores. Reduced herbivore damage, and the ability of introduced plants to allocate resources from defence to growth and reproduction can increase the success of introduced species. This mechanism is known as enemy release and is known to occur in some species and situations, but not in others.

Canopy damage during a natural drought depends on species identity, physiology and stand composition.

Vulnerability to xylem cavitation is a strong predictor of drought-induced damage in forest communities. However, biotic features of the community itself can influence water availability at the individual tree-level, thereby modifying patterns of drought damage. Using an experimental forest in Tasmania, Australia, we determined the vulnerability to cavitation (leaf P ) of four tree species and assessed the drought-induced canopy damage of 2944 6-yr-old trees after an extreme natural drought episode.

Aridity drives coordinated trait shifts but not decreased trait variance across the geographic range of eight Australian trees.

Large intraspecific functional trait variation strongly impacts many aspects of communities and ecosystems, and is the medium upon which evolution works. Yet intraspecific trait variation is inconsistent and hard to predict across traits, species and locations. We measured within-species variation in leaf mass per area (LMA), leaf dry matter content (LDMC), branch wood density (WD), and allocation to stem area vs leaf area in branches (branch Huber value (HV)) across the aridity range of seven Australian eucalypts and a co-occurring Acacia species to explore how traits and their variances change with aridity.

A meta-analysis of 1,119 manipulative experiments on terrestrial carbon-cycling responses to global change.

Direct quantification of terrestrial biosphere responses to global change is crucial for projections of future climate change in Earth system models. Here, we synthesized ecosystem carbon-cycling data from 1,119 experiments performed over the past four decades concerning changes in temperature, precipitation, CO and nitrogen across major terrestrial vegetation types of the world. Most experiments manipulated single rather than multiple global change drivers in temperate ecosystems of the USA, Europe and China.

Global change effects on plant communities are magnified by time and the number of global change factors imposed.

Global change drivers (GCDs) are expected to alter community structure and consequently, the services that ecosystems provide. Yet, few experimental investigations have examined effects of GCDs on plant community structure across multiple ecosystem types, and those that do exist present conflicting patterns. In an unprecedented global synthesis of over 100 experiments that manipulated factors linked to GCDs, we show that herbaceous plant community responses depend on experimental manipulation length and number of factors manipulated.

Globally consistent influences of seasonal precipitation limit grassland biomass response to elevated CO.

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration should stimulate biomass production directly via biochemical stimulation of carbon assimilation, and indirectly via water savings caused by increased plant water-use efficiency. Because of these water savings, the CO fertilization effect (CFE) should be stronger at drier sites, yet large differences among experiments in grassland biomass response to elevated CO appear to be unrelated to annual precipitation, preventing useful generalizations. Here, we show that, as predicted, the impact of elevated CO on biomass production in 19 globally distributed temperate grassland experiments reduces as mean precipitation in seasons other than spring increases, but that it rises unexpectedly as mean spring precipitation increases.

Elevated CO does not stimulate carbon sink in a semi-arid grassland.

Elevated CO is widely accepted to enhance terrestrial carbon sink, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. However, great uncertainties exist for the CO fertilisation effects, particularly when its interactions with other global change factors are considered. A four-factor (CO , temperature, precipitation and nitrogen) experiment revealed that elevated CO did not affect either gross ecosystem productivity or ecosystem respiration, and consequently resulted in no changes of net ecosystem productivity in a semi-arid grassland despite whether temperature, precipitation and nitrogen were elevated or not.

Ambient changes exceed treatment effects on plant species abundance in global change experiments.

The responses of species to environmental changes will determine future community composition and ecosystem function. Many syntheses of global change experiments examine the magnitude of treatment effect sizes, but we lack an understanding of how plant responses to treatments compare to ongoing changes in the unmanipulated (ambient or background) system. We used a database of long-term global change studies manipulating CO , nutrients, water, and temperature to answer three questions: (a) How do changes in plant species abundance in ambient plots relate to those in treated plots? (b) How does the magnitude of ambient change in species-level abundance over time relate to responsiveness to global change treatments? (c) Does the direction of species-level responses to global change treatments differ from the direction of ambient change? We estimated temporal trends in plant abundance for 791 plant species in ambient and treated plots across 16 long-term global change experiments yielding 2,116 experiment-species-treatment combinations.

Elevated CO2 and warming effects on grassland plant mortality are determined by the timing of rainfall.

Background And Aims: Global warming is expected to increase the mortality rate of established plants in water-limited systems because of its effect on evapotranspiration. The rising CO 2 concentration ([CO 2 ]), however, should have the opposite effect because it reduces plant transpiration, delaying the onset of drought. This potential for elevated [CO 2 ] (eCO 2 ) to modify the warming effect on mortality should be related to prevailing moisture conditions.

A water availability gradient reveals the deficit level required to affect traits in potted juvenile Eucalyptus globulus.

Background And Aims: Drought leading to soil water deficit can have severe impacts on plants. Water deficit may lead to plant water stress and affect growth and chemical traits. Plant secondary metabolite (PSM) responses to water deficit vary between compounds and studies, with inconsistent reports of changes to PSM concentrations even within a single species.

Partitioning direct and indirect effects reveals the response of water-limited ecosystems to elevated CO.

Increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide are expected to affect carbon assimilation and evapotranspiration (ET), ultimately driving changes in plant growth, hydrology, and the global carbon balance. Direct leaf biochemical effects have been widely investigated, whereas indirect effects, although documented, elude explicit quantification in experiments. Here, we used a mechanistic model to investigate the relative contributions of direct (through carbon assimilation) and indirect (via soil moisture savings due to stomatal closure, and changes in leaf area index) effects of elevated CO across a variety of ecosystems.

Seasonal not annual rainfall determines grassland biomass response to carbon dioxide.

The rising atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) should stimulate ecosystem productivity, but to what extent is highly uncertain, particularly when combined with changing temperature and precipitation. Ecosystem response to CO2 is complicated by biogeochemical feedbacks but must be understood if carbon storage and associated dampening of climate warming are to be predicted. Feedbacks through the hydrological cycle are particularly important and the physiology is well known; elevated CO2 reduces stomatal conductance and increases plant water use efficiency (the amount of water required to produce a unit of plant dry matter).

Selective grazing modifies previously anticipated responses of plant community composition to elevated CO(2) in a temperate grassland.

Our limited understanding of terrestrial ecosystem responses to elevated CO2 is a major constraint on predicting the impacts of climate change. A change in botanical composition has been identified as a key factor in the CO2 response with profound implications for ecosystem services such as plant production and soil carbon storage. In temperate grasslands, there is a strong consensus that elevated CO2 will result in a greater physiological stimulus to growth in legumes and to a lesser extent forbs, compared with C3 grasses, and the presumption this will lead in turn to a greater proportion of these functional groups in the plant community.

Changes in the microbial community structure of bacteria, archaea and fungi in response to elevated CO(2) and warming in an Australian native grassland soil.

The microbial community structure of bacteria, archaea and fungi is described in an Australian native grassland soil after more than 5 years exposure to different atmospheric CO2 concentrations ([CO2]) (ambient, +550 ppm) and temperatures (ambient, + 2°C) under different plant functional types (C3 and C4 grasses) and at two soil depths (0-5 cm and 5-10 cm). Archaeal community diversity was influenced by elevated [CO2], while under warming archaeal 16S rRNA gene copy numbers increased for C4 plant Themeda triandra and decreased for the C3 plant community (P < 0.05).

Simple additive effects are rare: a quantitative review of plant biomass and soil process responses to combined manipulations of CO2 and temperature.

In recent years, increased awareness of the potential interactions between rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations ([ CO2 ]) and temperature has illustrated the importance of multifactorial ecosystem manipulation experiments for validating Earth System models. To address the urgent need for increased understanding of responses in multifactorial experiments, this article synthesizes how ecosystem productivity and soil processes respond to combined warming and [ CO2 ] manipulation, and compares it with those obtained in single factor [ CO2 ] and temperature manipulation experiments. Across all combined elevated [ CO2 ] and warming experiments, biomass production and soil respiration were typically enhanced.

Stability of plant defensive traits among populations in two Eucalyptus species under elevated carbon dioxide.

Plant secondary metabolites (PSMs) mediate a wide range of ecological interactions. Investigating the effect of environment on PSM production is important for our understanding of how plants will adapt to large scale environmental change, and the extended effects on communities and ecosystems. We explored the production of PSMs under elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide ([CO(2)]) in the species rich, ecologically and commercially important genus Eucalyptus.

Influence of warming on soil water potential controls seedling mortality in perennial but not annual species in a temperate grassland.

In a water-limited system, the following hypotheses are proposed: warming will increase seedling mortality; elevated atmospheric CO2 will reduce seedling mortality by reducing transpiration, thereby increasing soil water availability; and longevity (i.e. whether a species is annual or perennial) will affect the response of a species to global changes.

Flowering phenology in a species-rich temperate grassland is sensitive to warming but not elevated CO2.

* Flowering is a critical stage in plant life cycles, and changes might alter processes at the species, community and ecosystem levels. Therefore, likely flowering-time responses to global change drivers are needed for predictions of global change impacts on natural and managed ecosystems. * Here, the impact of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration ([CO2]) (550 micromol mol(-1)) and warming (+2 masculineC) is reported on flowering times in a native, species-rich, temperate grassland in Tasmania, Australia in both 2004 and 2005.

Warming and free-air CO2 enrichment alter demographics in four co-occurring grassland species.

Species differ in their responses to global changes such as rising CO(2) and temperature, meaning that global changes are likely to change the structure of plant communities. Such alterations in community composition must be underlain by changes in the population dynamics of component species. Here, the impact of elevated CO(2) (550 micromol mol(-1)) and warming (+2 degrees C) on the population growth of four plant species important in Australian temperate grasslands is reported.

The response of leaf morphology to irradiance depends on altitude of origin in Nothofagus cunninghamii.

Leaf morphology varies reliably with increasing altitude in many species, and this is generally considered to be related to temperature. Changes in irradiance with elevation may confound any relationships between a morphological character and altitude, particularly if altitude of origin affects the response to irradiance. Here we describe the interaction between irradiance and altitude of origin on leaf morphology of Southern beech, Nothofagus cunninghamii.

The impacts of leaf shape and arrangement on light interception and potential photosynthesis in southern beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii).

The impact of differences in leaf shape, size and arrangement on the efficiency of light interception, and in particular the avoidance of photoinhibition, are poorly understood. We therefore estimated light exposure of branches in the cool temperate rainforest tree, Nothofagus cunninghamii (Hook.) Oerst.