Research Article

Distinct effects of drought and nitrogen enrichment on the compositional and productivity stability of temperate grasslands

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  • 1Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Ecology and Resource Use of the Mongolian Plateau; Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Grassland Ecology; Observation and Research Station for the Typical Steppe Ecosystem of the Ministry of Education; School of Ecology and Environment, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot 010021, China 

    2Ecology and Biodiversity Group, Department of Biology, Utrecht University, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands


    *Corresponding author. E-mail: zwxu@imu.edu.cn

Received date: 2025-05-10

  Accepted date: 2025-09-21

  Online published: 2025-10-13

Supported by

This work received support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China 8 (32060284), the Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia, China (2019JQ04), and the 9 Basic and Applied Basic Research Projects of Hohhot (2025-规-基-54)

Abstract

Drought events and nitrogen deposition are substantially modifying the stability of terrestrial ecosystems. Previous studies have mostly investigated these factors separately, with an emphasis on productivity stability, leaving their combined effects on multiple dimensions of ecosystem stability poorly understood. We conducted a four-year grassland manipulative experiment to examine how three drought scenarios—intense drought, chronic drought, and precipitation frequency reduction—interact with nitrogen addition to influence community compositional stability and productivity stability. The results showed that drought and nitrogen enrichment independently influenced grassland stability without significant interactions. Both intense and chronic drought reduced productivity stability, while reduced precipitation frequency decreased compositional stability. Nitrogen addition decreased both types of stability. Productivity stability was driven by the dominant species’ productivity stability or a combination of it and species asynchrony, depending on the drought scenario. Compositional stability consistently depended on the dominant species’ compositional stability. Compositional and productivity stability remained decoupled across treatments. This study provides the first empirical evidence of the divergent responses of grassland compositional and productivity stability to various drought scenarios under nitrogen enrichment. Our findings highlight the importance of prioritizing dominant species and promoting species coexistence with diverse environmental responses to maintain stable grassland composition and productivity under global change.

Cite this article

Jiatao Zhang, Lan Du, Yonghong Luo, Yann Hautier, Ru Tian, Yan Shen, Mohsin Mahmood, Zhuwen Xu . Distinct effects of drought and nitrogen enrichment on the compositional and productivity stability of temperate grasslands[J]. Journal of Plant Ecology, 0 : 1 . DOI: 10.1093/jpe/rtaf167

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