Rainfall Variability, Carbon Cycling, and Plant Species Diversity in a Mesic Grassland

By A. Knapp, Philip A. Fay, J. Blair, S. Collins, Melinda D. Smith, J. Carlisle, C. Harper, Brett T. Danner, Michelle S. Lett, J. McCarron. Science, 2002

1,190 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Ecology, Forestry, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/712eb97397e63648e448da093edfc9c33657721f

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Citations in the corpus

Defining the limit to resistance in a drought‐tolerant grassland: long‐term severe drought significantly reduces the dominant species and increases ruderals (2011, background): “Other 2- to 4-year studies have found little or no change in species richness under drought manipulations (Knapp et al. 2002; Yahdjian & Sala 2006), but it is difficult to tell from these short-term studies how and when species richness might have responded.”
Effects of altered precipitation on insect community composition and structure in a meadow steppe (2014, background): “E-mail: wangd@nenu.edu.cn (Knapp et al., 2002; Wu et al., 2011), especially in semi-arid and arid areas where water is the primary limiting factor to primary production.”
Mechanisms of Plant Invasions of North American and European Grasslands (2011, background): “The second feature of the climate of most grasslands is a large interannual and decadal variability in precipitation that can drive changes in community dominance (Knapp et al. 2002) as well as influence invasibility of these communities (Cleland et al. 2004).”
Water pulses and biogeochemical cycles in arid and semiarid ecosystems (2004, background): “Combined fixed-location rainout shelters with irrigation systems to redistribute water fallen on shelters permits the creation of multiple precipitation treatments, with almost no changes in water quality in the water supplemented plots (Fay et al. 2000; Knapp et al. 2002).”
Effects of climate extremes on the terrestrial carbon cycle: concepts, processes and potential future impacts (2015, background): “forests, soil respiration of grasslands decreases when soil moisture drops below critical 18 thresholds (Knapp et al., 2002; Bahn et al., 2008; Joos et al., 2010; Burri et al., 2014), with 19 consequences for annual soil respiration (Ma et al.”
Ecosystem stability and compensatory effects in the Inner Mongolia grassland (2004, background): “The values of CV comm for these Inner Mongolia steppes are comparable to those for the North America grasslands (25–35%”
Stability of tallgrass prairie during a 19‐year increase in growing season precipitation (2012, result): “In contrast, experiments have demon- strated that within-season variability in rainfall alters NPP in both mesic and arid grasslands (Knapp et al. 2002; Heisler- White et al. 2009; Thomey et al. 2011).”
Terrestrial ecosystem carbon dynamics and climate feedbacks (2008, background): “This is particularly evident for water–carbon-cycle interactions, where changes in the frequency or timing of rainfall without changes in the annual total may have profound effects on ecosystem productivit”
Biodiversity, phenology and temporal niche differences between native- and novel exotic-dominated grasslands (2011, background): “Research on rainfall variability has found that subordinate species are more strongly affected by variability (Knapp et al., 2002) than dominant grass species (Williams et al.”
Variability in amount and frequency of water supply affects roots but not growth of arid shrubs (2009, background): “…analyzed the effects on plant functional traits, as surrogates of performance (Violle et al. 2007), and growth, expecting that pulses of water of different magnitude have different effects on plants, even if the amount of water provided was kept constant (Knapp et al. 2002; Reynolds et al. 2004).”
Plant community responses to nitrogen addition and increased precipitation: the importance of water availability and species traits (2011, background): “A previous study in the tallgrass prairie of the Great Plains of North American demonstrated that intraannual distribution of precipitation has stronger impacts on plant diversity than precipitation amount (Knapp et al., 2002).”
Plant species richness and functional groups have different effects on soil water content in a decade‐long grassland experiment (2018, background): “Soil water availability is a key driver for biological and chemical soil processes and an important limiting factor for plant productivity (Knapp et al., 2002; Sala, Parton, Joyce, & Lauenroth, 1988; Zscheischler et al., 2016).”
Soil Water Balance and Ecosystem Response to Climate Change (2004, background): “Figure 3 shows a comparison of the experimental results (Knapp et al. 2002) with the theoretical mean carbon assimilation as a function of the frequency of rainfall events for fixed total rainfall during a growing season.”
Precipitation pulses and carbon fluxes in semiarid and arid ecosystems (2004, methodology): “Groundbreaking experiments such as by Knapp and coworkers (e.g., Knapp et al. 2002; Fay et al. 2003) have provided solid evidence that differences in precipitation patterns alone, independent of rainfall amount, can have a large impact on community composition and possibly ecosystem structure and…”
Germination, survival, and growth of grass and forb seedlings: Effects of soil moisture variability (2009, background): “Knapp et al. (2002) reported that experimental rainfall applications that increased the occurrence of extreme events resulted in increased plant diversity and species turnover in grassland.”
Convergence across biomes to a common rain-use efficiency (2004, background): “Existing global change manipulations in a tallgrass prairi”