Middle-Eastern plant communities tolerate 9 years of drought in a multi-site climate manipulation experiment

Katja Tielbörger (), Mark C. Bilton, Johannes Metz, Jaime Kigel, Claus Holzapfel, Edwin Lebrija-Trejos, Irit Konsens, Hadas A. Parag and Marcelo Sternberg
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Katja Tielbörger: University of Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 5
Mark C. Bilton: University of Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 5
Johannes Metz: University of Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 5
Jaime Kigel: Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Claus Holzapfel: Rutgers University, 195 University Avenue
Edwin Lebrija-Trejos: Tel Aviv University
Irit Konsens: Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Hadas A. Parag: University of Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 5
Marcelo Sternberg: Tel Aviv University

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract For evaluating climate change impacts on biodiversity, extensive experiments are urgently needed to complement popular non-mechanistic models which map future ecosystem properties onto their current climatic niche. Here, we experimentally test the main prediction of these models by means of a novel multi-site approach. We implement rainfall manipulations—irrigation and drought—to dryland plant communities situated along a steep climatic gradient in a global biodiversity hotspot containing many wild progenitors of crops. Despite the large extent of our study, spanning nine plant generations and many species, very few differences between treatments were observed in the vegetation response variables: biomass, species composition, species richness and density. The lack of a clear drought effect challenges studies classifying dryland ecosystems as most vulnerable to global change. We attribute this resistance to the tremendous temporal and spatial heterogeneity under which the plants have evolved, concluding that this should be accounted for when predicting future biodiversity change.

Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6102

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