Clipping defoliation eliminates the stimulating effects of nitrogen enrichment on the aboveground productivity of an alpine meadow

Ning Zong and Peili Shi
Additional contact information
Ning Zong: Lhasa National Ecological Research Station, Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modelling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China
Peili Shi: Lhasa National Ecological Research Station, Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modelling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China

Plant, Soil and Environment, 2020, vol. 66, issue 1, 47-56

Abstract: To investigate how clipping (CL) regulates the effects of nutrient addition, an experiment, including CL and nitrogen (N) addition, was conducted in an alpine meadow. Nitrogen treatment increased community coverage (48-113% higher than the control) and aboveground biomass (29-117% higher than the control), which was mainly attributed to grass growth. Both N and N + CL treatments showed a tendency to reducing species richness, while significant reduction only occurred in 2016 and 2017 in CL treatment. Clipping showed a tendency to decrease community cover (3-37% lower than the control) and aboveground biomass (2-34% lower than the control), while N + CL treatment had no effect, indicating that clipping can eliminate the simulated effects of N addition. Nitrogen addition significantly increased soil inorganic N (SIN, 528-1230% higher than the control), while SIN in N + CL was 25-48% lower than N treatment. The decrease in stimulated effects in N + CL was attributed to SIN decrease, which resulted from the aboveground biomass removal by clipping. Our results show that clipping can take away aboveground biomass and cause soil nutrients to decrease, which slows down the degraded grassland recovery. This suggests that grazing exclusion may eliminate the effect of nitrogen deposition on aboveground production in alpine grasslands.

Keywords: compensatory growth; nutrient improvement; plant functional group; selective clipping; Tibetan Plateau (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://pse.agriculturejournals.cz/doi/10.17221/543/2019-PSE.html (text/html)
http://pse.agriculturejournals.cz/doi/10.17221/543/2019-PSE.pdf (application/pdf)
free of charge

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:caa:jnlpse:v:66:y:2020:i:1:id:543-2019-pse

DOI: 10.17221/543/2019-PSE

Access Statistics for this article

Plant, Soil and Environment is currently edited by Kateřina Součková

More articles in Plant, Soil and Environment from Czech Academy of Agricultural Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ivo Andrle ().