The Importance of Being First: Exploring Priority and Diversity Effects in a Grassland Field Experiment.

ABSTRACT: Diversity of species and order of arrival can have strong effects on ecosystem functioning and community composition, but these two have rarely been explicitly combined in experimental setups. We measured the effects of both species diversity and order of arrival on ecosystem function and community composition in a grassland field experiment, thus combining biodiversity and assembly approaches. We studied the effect of order of arrival of three plant functional groups (PFGs: grasses, legumes, and non-leguminous forbs) and of sowing low and high diversity seed mixtures (9 or 21 species) on species composition and aboveground biomass. The experiment was set up in two different soil types. Differences in PFG order of arrival affected the biomass, the number of species and community compositio

SUBMITTER: Weidlich EW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5221677 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature