Relationships between plant community productivity and diversity vary with trampling disturbance in an Inner-Mongolian steppe

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-775920/v1

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Relationships between plant community productivity and diversity vary with trampling disturbance in an Inner-Mongolian steppe

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-775920/v1

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The relationship between diversity and productivity of plant communities is an important issue in grassland restoration. However, the degree to which this relationship varies during the restoration stage after trampling disturbance is not clear. Here, we conducted a five-year study in a steppe after 4-year trampling to detect restoration patterns of plant community and investigate variation in diversity-productivity relationships. Our results showed that community cover, abundance, height, and productivity recovered quickly after the trampling disturbance ceased. However, the recovery of diversity was slower than biomass in the steppe. In addition, grass, annual, and biennial recovery was more rapidly than the recovery of forbs in the steppe. Moreover, following the restoration process, the positive correlation between productivity and diversity was decoupled, and a negative correlation between productivity and diversity developed. Our finding provides the key evidence for the asynchronous relation between productivity and diversity, and reveals that grass restored more rapidly than forbs in plant community restoration after disturbance. This study indicates that the trade-off between plant community structure and function can vary with the restoration process, and implicates that future modeling and experimental studies should focus on the different responses of productivity and diversity in plant community restoration.

Terrestrial Ecology

functional group

grassland restoration

human disturbance

semi-arid grassland

Table 1 Results of three-way and two-way ANOVAs for the variations in species richness, abundance, aboveground biomass (AGB), cover, height, and Shannon-Weiner diversity index (diversity) for the entire plant community and under different functional groups (FG), treatments and years.

	Species richness		Abundance		Productivity		Cover		Height		Diversity
	F	P	F	P	F	P	F	P	F	P	F	P
Three way
FG	235.0	<0.001	191.8	<0.001	336.0	<0.001	366.5	<0.001	157.9	<0.001
Year	23.2	<0.001	30.0	<0.001	106.6	<0.001	50.3	<0.001	115.0	<0.001
Treat	547.4	<0.001	5.6	0.019	1.6	0.213	143.1	<0.001	16.3	<0.001
FG * Year	7.5	<0.001	17.4	<0.001	53.8	<0.001	21.6	<0.001	17.3	<0.001
FG * Treat	234.5	<0.001	17.7	<0.001	644.2	<0.001	599.7	<0.001	67.8	<0.001
Year * Treat	33.8	<0.001	13.3	<0.001	50.2	<0.001	18.7	<0.001	80.1	<0.001
FG * Year * Treat	4.0	<0.001	12.8	<0.001	54.9	<0.001	17.3	<0.001	15.5	<0.001
Two way
Treat	603.3	<0.001	6.3	0.014	2.3	0.130	197.7	<0.001	77.0	<0.001	220.6	<0.001
year	25.6	<0.001	33.7	<0.001	159.2	<0.001	69.5	<0.001	13.2	<0.001	29.6	<0.001
Treat*year	37.2	<0.001	14.9	<0.001	75.0	<0.001	25.8	<0.001	11.7	<0.001	14.9	<0.001

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Relationships between plant community productivity and diversity vary with trampling disturbance in an Inner-Mongolian steppe

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