Plant species richness and functional traits affect community stability after a flood event.
Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events. It is therefore of major importance to identify the community attributes that confer stability in ecological communities during such events. In June 2013, a flood event affected a plant diversity experiment in Central Europe (Jena, Germany). We assessed the effects of plant species richness, functional diversity, flooding intensity and community means of functional traits on different measures of stability (resistance, resilience and raw biomass changes from pre-flood conditions). Surprisingly, plant species richness reduced community resistance in response to the flood. This was mostly because more diverse communities grew more immediately following the flood. Raw biomass increased over the previous year; this resulted in decreased absolute value measures of resistance. There was no clear response pattern for resilience. We found that functional traits drove these changes in raw biomass: communities with a high proportion of late-season, short-statured plants with dense, shallow roots and small leaves grew more following the flood. Late-growing species probably avoided the flood, whereas greater root length density might have allowed species to better access soil resources brought from the flood, thus growing more in the aftermath. We conclude that resource inputs following mild floods may favour the importance of traits related to resource acquisition and be less associated with flooding tolerance.
Department of Ecology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul-UFRGS, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil felicia.fischer@ufrgs.br.
Felícia M
FM
Fischer
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany Department of Science and Mathematics, FIT, New York, NY, USA.
Alexandra J
AJ
Wright
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany Institute of Biology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany.
Nico
N
Eisenhauer
Institute of Ecology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany.
Anne
A
Ebeling
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany UFZ, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Physiological Diversity, Leipzig, Germany.
Christiane
C
Roscher
Department of Evolutionary Ecology and Environmental Studies, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.
Cameron
C
Wagg
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany Institute of Biology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany.
Alexandra
A
Weigelt
Terrestrial Ecology Research Group, Department of Ecology and Ecosystem Management, School of Life Sciences, Technische Universität München, Freising, Germany.
Wolfgang W
WW
Weisser
Department of Ecology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul-UFRGS, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
Valério D
VD
Pillar
D044822:Biodiversity; D018533:Biomass; D057231:Climate Change; D055868:Floods; D005858:Germany; D065948:Grassland; D018521:Plant Physiological Phenomena
biodiversity; biomass; grasslands; resilience; resistance