Home > Articles > Published articles > Experimental and observational studies find contrasting responses of soil nutrients to climate change |
Date: | 2017 |
Abstract: | Manipulative experiments and observations along environmental gradients, the two most common approaches to evaluate the impacts of climate change on nutrient cycling, are generally assumed to produce similar results, but this assumption has rarely been tested. We did so by conducting a meta-analysis and found that soil nutrients responded differentially to drivers of climate change depending on the approach considered. Soil carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus concentrations generally decreased with water addition in manipulative experiments but increased with annual precipitation along environmental gradients. Different patterns were also observed between warming experiments and temperature gradients. Our findings provide evidence of inconsistent results and suggest that manipulative experiments may be better predictors of the causal impacts of short-term (months to years) climate change on soil nutrients but environmental gradients may provide better information for long-term correlations (centuries to millennia) between these nutrients and climatic features. Ecosystem models should consequently incorporate both experimental and observational data to properly assess the impacts of climate change on nutrient cycling. |
Grants: | European Commission 610028 Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación CGL2016-79835-P Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca 2014/SGR-274 European Commission 242658 European Commission 647038 European Commission 702057 |
Note: | Agraïments: This work was financially supported by The National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFA0600801), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31370455 and 31570438), and One Hundred Person Project of The Chinese Academy of Sciences (K318021405) and of Shaanxi Province. |
Rights: | Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original. |
Language: | Anglès |
Document: | Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada |
Published in: | eLife, Vol 6, art e23255 (June 2017) , ISSN 2050-084X |
19 p, 4.3 MB |