title: Middle-Eastern plant communities tolerate 9 years of drought in a multi-site climate manipulation experiment.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 5, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Katja
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tielbörger
authors.affiliation: Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 5, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Mark C
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Bilton
authors.affiliation: Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 5, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Johannes
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Metz
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
authors.forename: Jaime
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kigel
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological Sciences, Rutgers University, 195 University Avenue, Newark, New Jersey 07102, USA.
authors.forename: Claus
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Holzapfel
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 69978 Israel.
authors.forename: Edwin
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lebrija-Trejos
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
authors.forename: Irit
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Konsens
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 5, 72076 Tübingen, Germany [2] Department of Biological Sciences, Rutgers University, 195 University Avenue, Newark, New Jersey 07102, USA.
authors.forename: Hadas A
authors.initials: HA
authors.lastname: Parag
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 69978 Israel.
authors.forename: Marcelo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sternberg
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D018533:Biomass; D002980:Climate; D057231:Climate Change; D055864:Droughts; D017753:Ecosystem; D005843:Geography; D008877:Middle East; D018521:Plant Physiological Phenomena; D010944:Plants / Q000378:metabolism*; D011891:Rain; D012987:Soil; D013997:Time Factors
chemical_list: D012987:Soil