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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Plant Functional Diversity Increases Biomass Production In The Establishment Of Perennial Herbaceous Polycultures, V. D. Picasso, E. C. Brummer Aug 2023

Plant Functional Diversity Increases Biomass Production In The Establishment Of Perennial Herbaceous Polycultures, V. D. Picasso, E. C. Brummer

IGC Proceedings (1997-2023)

Natural grasslands are functionally diverse mixtures of perennial species and provide a model for sustainable agriculture systems. There is strong evidence for positive relationships between species and functional diversity and ecosystem processes like productivity and stability (Loreau et al., 2001). This research aimed mainly to study the effect on biomass production (BM) of increasing plant functional diversity in agriculturally relevant perennial herbaceous polycultures during their establishment years.


How Do Ecological Resilience Metrics Relate To Community Stability And Collapse?, Caleb P. Roberts, Dirac L. Twidwell Jr, David G. Angeler, Craig R. Allen Jul 2019

How Do Ecological Resilience Metrics Relate To Community Stability And Collapse?, Caleb P. Roberts, Dirac L. Twidwell Jr, David G. Angeler, Craig R. Allen

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

The concept of ecological resilience (the amount of disturbance a system can absorb before collapsing and reorganizing) holds potential for predicting community change and collapse—increasingly common issues in the Anthropocene. Yet neither the predictions nor metrics of resilience have received rigorous testing. The crossscale resilience model, a leading operationalization of resilience, proposes resilience can be quantified by the combination of diversity and redundancy of functions performed by species operating at different scales. Here, we use 48 years of sub-continental avian community data aggregated at multiple spatial scales to calculate resilience metrics derived from the cross-scale resilience model (i.e., cross-scale diversity, …


Can Functional Traits Predict Plant Community Response To Global Change?, Sarah Kimball, Jennifer L. Funk, Marko J. Spasojevic, Katharine N. Suding, Scot Parker, Michael K. Goulden Dec 2016

Can Functional Traits Predict Plant Community Response To Global Change?, Sarah Kimball, Jennifer L. Funk, Marko J. Spasojevic, Katharine N. Suding, Scot Parker, Michael K. Goulden

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

One primary goal at the intersection of community ecology and global change biology is to identify functional traits that are useful for predicting plant community response to global change. We used observations of community composition from a long-term field experiment in two adjacent plant communities (grassland and coastal sage shrub) to investigate how nine key plant functional traits were related to altered water and nitrogen availability following fire. We asked whether the functional responses of species found in more than one community type were context dependent and whether community-weighted mean and functional diversity were significantly altered by water and nitrogen …