title: Multiple Resource Use Efficiency (mRUE): A New Concept for Ecosystem Production.
abstract: The resource-driven concept, which is an important school for investigating ecosystem production, has been applied for decades. However, the regulatory mechanisms of production by multiple resources remain unclear. We formulated a new algorithm model that integrates multiple resource uses to study ecosystem production and tested its applications on a water-availability gradient in semi-arid grassland. The result of our experiment showed that changes in water availability significantly affected the resources of light and nitrogen, and altered the relationships among multiple resource absorption rate (ε), multiple resource use efficiency (mRUE), and available resource (Ravail). The increased water availability suppressed ecosystem mRUE (i.e., "declining marginal returns"); The changes in mRUE had a negative effect on ε (i.e., "inverse feedback"). These two processes jointly regulated that the stimulated single resource availability would promote ecosystem production rather than suppress it, even when mRUE was reduced. This study illustrated the use of the mRUE model in exploring the coherent relationships among the key parameters on regulating the ecosystem production for future modeling, and evaluated the sensitivity of this conceptual model under different dataset properties. However, this model needs extensive validation by the ecological community before it can extrapolate this method to other ecosystems in the future.
authors.affiliation: International Center for Ecology, Meteorology, and Environment, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China.
authors.forename: Juanjuan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Han
authors.affiliation: CGCEO/Geography, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, USA.
authors.forename: Jiquan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: International Joint Research Laboratory for Global Change Ecology, State Key Laboratory of Cotton Biology, College of Life Sciences, Henan University, Kaifeng, Henan 475004, China.
authors.forename: Yuan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Miao
authors.affiliation: International Joint Research Laboratory for Global Change Ecology, State Key Laboratory of Cotton Biology, College of Life Sciences, Henan University, Kaifeng, Henan 475004, China.
authors.forename: Shiqiang
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wan
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D017753:Ecosystem; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011642:Publications; D013269:Stochastic Processes