Biodiversity for multifunctional grasslands: equal productivity in high-diversity low-input and low-diversity high-input systems

By A. Weigelt, W. Weisser, Nina Buchmann, M. Scherer‐Lorenzen. 2009

169 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. Modern grassland management seeks to provide many ecosystem services and experimental studies in resource-poor grasslands have shown a positive relationship between plant species richness and a variety of ecosystem functions. Thus, increasing species richness might help to enhance multifunctionality in managed grasslands if the relationship between species richness and ecosystem functioning is equally valid in high-input grassland systems. We tested the relative effects of low-input to high-input management intensities and low to high plant species richness. Using a combination of mowing frequencies (1, 2 or 4 cuts per season) and fertilisation levels (0, 100 and 200 kg N ha−1 a−1), we studied the productivity of 78 experimental grassland communities of increasing plant species richness (1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 species with 1 to 4 functional groups) in two successive years. Our results showed that in both years higher diversity was more effective in increasing productivity than higher management intensity: the 16-species mixtures had a surplus of 449 g m−2 y−1 in 2006 and 492 g m−2 y−1 in 2007 over the monoculture yields whereas the high-input management resulted in only 315 g m−2 y−1 higher productivity in 2006 and 440 g m−2 y−1 in 2007 than the low-input management. In addition, high-diversity low-input grassland communities had similar productivity as low-diversity high-input communities. The slopes of the biodiversity – productivity relationships significantly increased with increasing levels of management intensity in both years. We conclude that the biological mechanisms leading to enhanced biomass production in diverse grassland communities are as effective for productivity as a combination of several agricultural measures. Our results demonstrate that high-diversity low-input grassland communities provide not only a high diversity of plants and other organisms, but also ensure high forage yields, thus granting the basis for multifunctional managed grasslands.

Subfields: Forestry, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8563b7a1944f9220c613994ebd038282ec7fcd6c

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Citations in the corpus

Ecosystem function enhanced by combining four functional types of plant species in intensively managed grassland mixtures: a 3‐year continental‐scale field experiment (2013, background): “Thus, grass–legume mixtures at lower levels of nitrogen application could exceed (or be comparable to) the yield of grass monocultures with high (nonlimiting) levels of nitrogen (Nyfeler et al. 2009; Weigelt et al. 2009).”
Herbivore and pollinator responses to grassland management intensity along experimental changes in plant species richness (2012, methodology): “For details of the methods of sampling community biomass see Weigelt et al. (2009). Additionally, we assessed plant species richness in the subplots to determine if originally sown plant species richness had changed since sowing in 2002.”
Biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning in a 15-year grassland experiment: Patterns, mechanisms, and open questions (2017, background): “Five subplots were established and management varied in mowing regime (one (M1), two (M2) or four (M4) cuts per year) and the amount of NPKfertilizer application (no fertilizer (F0); 100 (F100) or 200 (F200) kg N ha−1 yr−1) and similar increases in P and K additions (Weigelt et al. 2009).”
The effect of biodiversity on tree productivity: from temperate to boreal forests (2011, result): “This observation appears to contradict results obtained in experiments where fertility was manipulated (e.g. Fridley, 2003; Weigelt et al., 2009) in which the biodiversity effect is often found to be increasing with fertility, not the reverse.”
Designing forest biodiversity experiments: general considerations illustrated by a new large experiment in subtropical China (2014, background): “…vs. forests (for which we address design questions here), between homogeneous and heterogeneous environmental conditions (Wacker et al. 2008), between low-and high-nutrient environments (Weigelt et al. 2009), and between diﬀerent ecosystem functions such as productivity vs. erosion control.”