Climate-driven diversity loss in a grassland community.

ABSTRACT: Local ecological communities represent the scale at which species coexist and share resources, and at which diversity has been experimentally shown to underlie stability, productivity, invasion resistance, and other desirable community properties. Globally, community diversity shows a mixture of increases and decreases over recent decades, and these changes have relatively seldom been linked to climatic trends. In a heterogeneous California grassland, we documented declining plant diversity from 2000 to 2014 at both the local community (5 m(2)) and landscape (27 km(2)) scales, across multiple functional groups and soil environments. Communities became particularly poorer in native annual forbs, which are present as small seedlings in midwinter; within native annual forbs, community composi

SUBMITTER: Harrison SP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4507231 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature