1. Unimodal productivity–biodiversity relationship along the gradient of multidimensional resources across Chinese grasslands.
- Author
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Wang, Yanfen, Du, Jianqing, Pang, Zhe, Liu, Yali, Xue, Kai, Hautier, Yann, Zhang, Biao, Tang, Li, Jiang, Lili, Ji, Baoming, Xu, Xingliang, Zhang, Jing, Hu, Ronghai, Zhou, Shutong, Wang, Fang, Che, Rongxiao, Wang, Di, Zhou, Chaoting, Cui, Xiaoyong, and Eisenhauer, Nico
- Subjects
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GRASSLANDS , *PLANT diversity , *HABITATS - Abstract
Resources can affect plant productivity and biodiversity simultaneously and thus are key drivers of their relationships in addition to plant–plant interactions. However, most previous studies only focused on a single resource while neglecting the nature of resource multidimensionality. Here we integrated four essential resources for plant growth into a single metric of resource diversity (RD) to investigate its effects on the productivity–biodiversity relationship (PBR) across Chinese grasslands. Results showed that habitats differing in RD have different PBRs—positive in low-resource habitats, but neutral in medium- and high-resource ones—while collectively, a weak positive PBR was observed. However, when excluding direct effects of RD on productivity and biodiversity, the PBR in high-resource habitats became negative, which leads to a unimodal instead of a positive PBR along the RD gradient. By integrating resource effects and changing plant–plant interactions into a unified framework with the RD gradient, our work contributes to uncovering underlying mechanisms for inconsistent PBRs at large scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
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