Life Sciences Commons^™

Anthropogenic Nitrogen Deposition Predicts Local Grassland Primary Production Worldwide, Carly J. Stevens, Eric M. Lind, Yann Hautier, W. Stanley Harpole, Elizabeth T. Borer, Eric W. Seabloom, Laura Ladwig, Jonathan D. Bakker, Chengjin Chu, Scott Collins, Kendi F. Davies, Jennifer Firn, Helmut Hillebrand, Kimberly J. La Pierre, Andrew Macdougall, Brett Melbourne, Rebecca L. Mcculley, John Morgan, John L. Orrock, Suzanne M. Prober, Anita C. Risch, Martin Schuetz, Peter D. Wragg

Plant and Soil Sciences Faculty Publications

Humans dominate many important Earth system processes including the nitrogen (N) cycle. Atmospheric N deposition affects fundamental processes such as carbon cycling, climate regulation, and biodiversity, and could result in changes to fundamental Earth system processes such as primary production. Both modelling and experimentation have suggested a role for anthropogenically altered N deposition in increasing productivity, nevertheless, current understanding of the relative strength of N deposition with respect to other controls on production such as edaphic conditions and climate is limited. Here we use an international multiscale data set to show that atmospheric N deposition is positively correlated to aboveground …