title: Long-term decline in grassland productivity driven by increasing dryness.
abstract: Increasing aridity and drought severity forecast for many land areas could reduce the land carbon (C) sink. However, with limited long-term direct measures, it is difficult to distinguish direct drying effects from counter effects of CO2 enrichment and nitrogen (N) deposition. Here, we document a >50% decline in production of a native C3 grassland over four decades and assign the forcing and timing to increasing aridity and specifically to declining late-summer rainfall. Analysis of C and N stable isotopes in biomass suggests that enhanced water use efficiency via CO2 enrichment may have slightly ameliorated the productivity decline but that changes in N had no effects. Identical declines in a long-term snow-addition experiment definitively identified increasing late-summer dryness as the cause. Our results demonstrate lasting consequences of recent climate change on grassland production and underscore the importance of understanding past climate-ecosystem coupling to predicting future responses to changing climate.
authors.affiliation: Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences, Bozeman, Montana 59715, USA.
authors.forename: E N J
authors.initials: EN
authors.lastname: Brookshire
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology, Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana 59715, USA.
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Weaver