Ecosystem function enhanced by combining four functional types of plant species in intensively managed grassland mixtures: a 3‐year continental‐scale field experiment

By John A. Finn, L. Kirwan, John Connolly, M. Sebastiá, Á. Helgadóttir, O. Baadshaug, G. Bélanger, A. Black, C. Brophy, Rosemary P. Collins and 22 more. 2013

343 citations recorded by the source corpus.

1.A coordinated continental-scale field experiment across 31 sites was used to compare the biomass yield of monocultures and four species mixtures associated with intensively managed agricultural grassland systems. To increase complementarity in resource use, each of the four species in the experimental design represented a distinct functional type derived from two levels of each of two functional traits, nitrogen acquisition (N2-fixing legume or nonfixing grass) crossed with temporal development (fast-establishing or temporally persistent). Relative abundances of the four functional types in mixtures were systematically varied at sowing to vary the evenness of the same four species in mixture communities at each site and sown at two levels of seed density. 2.Across multiple years, the total yield (including weed biomass) of the mixtures exceeded that of the average monoculture in >97% of comparisons. It also exceeded that of the best monoculture (transgressive overyielding) in about 60% of sites, with a mean yield ratio of mixture to best-performing monoculture of 1·07 across all sites. Analyses based on yield of sown species only (excluding weed biomass) demonstrated considerably greater transgressive overyielding (significant at about 70% of sites, ratio of mixture to best-performing monoculture = 1·18). 3.Mixtures maintained a resistance to weed invasion over at least 3 years. In mixtures, median values indicate

Subfields: Forestry, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7297c8e7d4b7f63683f73b6b776d91b4dd63dc74

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Citations in the corpus

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning (2014, background): “Productivity was significantly greater in mixtures of 4 species than in monocultures at all 31 sites, including 680 out of 682 species mixtures (Finn et al. 2013).”
Benefits of Condensed Tannins in Forage Legumes Fed to Ruminants: Importance of Structure, Concentration, and Diet Composition (2019, background): “Cocultivation of Legumes and Companion Crops Cocultivation of forage legumes with companion crops can deliver higher total yields (Nyfeler et al., 2009; Döring et al., 2013; Finn et al., 2013; Mora-Ortiz, 2015; Hunt et al., 2016; Malisch et al., 2017), more nitrogen fixed per hectare (Nyfeler et al.”
Cover Crop Biomass Production Is More Important than Diversity for Weed Suppression (2019, background): “The timing of that productivity may also be important (Döring et al., 2012a; Finn et al., 2013), but it was not investigated in this trial.”
Potential of legume-based grassland–livestock systems in Europe: a review (2013, background): “…the three experimental years, over the different legume species tested and over the large climatic gradient covered by the experimental sites, spanning a latitudinal range from 40 ° 44 0 N (Sardinia, Italy) to 69 ° 40 0 N (Tromsø, Norway) (Finn et al. , 2013; Sturlud (cid:2) ottir et al. , 2013).”
Yield of temperate forage grassland species is either largely resistant or resilient to experimental summer drought (2016, background): “Overyielding of mixtures with species differing in their functional traits has recently been demonstrated in intensively managed grassland under ambient climatic conditions (Nyfeler et al. 2009; Finn et al. 2013).”
Testing the effects of diversity on ecosystem multifunctionality using a multivariate model (2015, background): “A four-species grassland biodiversity field experiment was established in 2002 at Merelbeke in Belgium as part of a larger agro-diversity experiment (Kirwan et al. 2007; Finn et al. 2013) and the data are publicly available as ‘site 1’ in Kirwan et al. (2014).”