Carbon balance of Arctic tundra under increased snow cover mediated by a plant pathogen

By J. Olofsson, L. Ericson, Mikaela Torp, S. Stark, R. Baxter. 2011

101 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climate change is affecting plant community composition1 and ecosystem structure, with consequences for ecosystem processes such as carbon storage2, 3, 4. Climate can affect plants directly by altering growth rates1, and indirectly by affecting predators and herbivores, which in turn influence plants5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Diseases are also known to be important for the structure and function of food webs10, 11, 12, 13, 14. However, the role of plant diseases in modulating ecosystem responses to a changing climate is poorly understood15, 16. This is partly because disease outbreaks are relatively rare and spatially variable, such that that their effects can only be captured in long-term experiments. Here we show that, although plant growth was favoured by the insulating effects of increased snow cover in experimental plots in Sweden, plant biomass decreased over the seven-year study. The decline in biomass was caused by an outbreak of a host-specific parasitic fungus, Arwidssonia empetri, which killed the majority of the shoots of the dominant plant species, Empetrum hermaphroditum, after six years of increased snow cover. After the outbreak of the disease, instantaneous measurements of gross photosynthesis and net ecosystem carbon exchange were significantly reduced at midday during the growing season. Our results show that plant diseases can alter and even reverse the effects of a changing climate on tundra carbon balance by altering plant composition.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14952cbbd0f4a0cfb35c74ff466487485f700200

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Citations in the corpus

Where, when and how plant-soil feedback matters in a changing world (2016, background): “Microbial pathogens can adapt quickly to drought (Newton, Johnson & Gregory 2011) and break out of specific pathogens may be favored by changes in moisture conditions (Desprez-Loustau et al. 2006; Olofsson et al. 2011).”
The snow and the willows: earlier spring snowmelt reduces performance in the low‐lying alpine shrub Salix herbacea (2016, background): “Despite showing an increase in fungal phytopathogen infection with longer snowcover, Olofsson et al. (2011) still demonstrated that a fungal pathogen outbreak triggered by changes in snowmelt timing can alter the entire community structure in arctic shrub heathland.”
Shrub expansion in tundra ecosystems: dynamics, impacts and research priorities (2011, background): “Biotic interactions with herbivores [54, 55], pollinators [56], pathogens [57] or soil mycorrhizae [58], and”