Land Use Alters the Drought Responses of Productivity and CO2 Fluxes in Mountain Grassland.

ABSTRACT: Climate extremes and land-use changes can have major impacts on the carbon cycle of ecosystems. Their combined effects have rarely been tested. We studied whether and how the abandonment of traditionally managed mountain grassland changes the resilience of carbon dynamics to drought. In an in situ common garden experiment located in a subalpine meadow in the Austrian Central Alps, we exposed intact ecosystem monoliths from a managed and an abandoned mountain grassland to an experimental early-summer drought and measured the responses of gross primary productivity, ecosystem respiration, phytomass and its components, and of leaf area index during the drought and the subsequent recovery period. Across all these parameters, the managed grassland was more strongly affected by drought and recov

SUBMITTER: Ingrisch J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5982442 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature