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Nitrogen Enrichment Reduces Nitrogen and Phosphorus Resorption Through Changes to Species Resorption and Plant Community Composition

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Abstract

Anthropogenic nitrogen (N) deposition has affected plant community composition and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. This includes changes to the way plants use and recycle nutrients, including effects on nutrient resorption, which is a key process through which plants recover nutrients from tissue during senescence. Nutrient resorption has considerable adaptive and functional significance for plants and helps regulate core ecosystem processes such as decomposition. However, our understanding of how N deposition affects nutrient resorption and, in particular, of how N inputs alter ecosystem resorption via changes to existing species’ resorption compared with changes to community composition remains poor. To disentangle the role of species versus community composition controls driving variation in nutrient resorption responses to N inputs, we carried out an experiment with six different N addition rates in a temperate steppe. We found that species-scale nutrient resorption responses to N enrichment were variable; for example, only half of the measured species reduced both N and P resorption efficiency in response to increased N inputs. In contrast, community-scale responses consistently resulted in reduced N and P resorption. Still, N-induced changes in community composition were a weaker control on overall resorption responses than were the effects on individual species; however, it was the synergistic interaction between the two that resulted in the large total reductions of nutrient resorption in the face of increased N. Taken together, our results highlight that understanding and predicting nutrient resorption responses will be most accurately scaled by accounting not only for species’ reductions in resorption but also for changes in community composition.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the staff of the Inner Mongolia Grassland Ecosystem Research Station for their support. Comments from two anonymous reviewers contributed substantially to improving the manuscript. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31822006 and 31770503), K.C.Wong Education Foundation (GJTD-2019-10), Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA23070103), and the Key Research Program from CAS (QYZDB-SSW-DQC006). S.R. was supported by the U.S. Geological Survey Ecosystems Mission Area. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Erguna Forest-Steppe Ecotone Research Station, CAS Key Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Management, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110016, China

    Xiao-Tao Lü, Shuang-Li Hou, Yan-Yu Hu, Hai-Wei Wei, Guo-Jiao Yang & Zhuo-Yi Liu

  2. Southwest Biological Science Center, U.S. Geological Survey, Moab, Utah, USA

    Sasha Reed

  3. School of Life Sciences, Liaoning University, Shenyang, 110036, China

    Jiang-Xia Yin & Zhi-Wei Zhang

  4. State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093, China

    Xing-Guo Han

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  1. Xiao-Tao Lü
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XTL, SLH and XGH designed the study. SLH, YYH, HWW, ZWZ, ZYL and GJY collected the data. XTL, SCR, JXY and SLH analyzed the data. XTL, JXY and SCR wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and substantially contributed to manuscript revisions.

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Lü, XT., Hou, SL., Reed, S. et al. Nitrogen Enrichment Reduces Nitrogen and Phosphorus Resorption Through Changes to Species Resorption and Plant Community Composition. Ecosystems 24, 602–612 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-020-00537-0

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