To paraphrase Thomas Henry Huxley: How stupid of us not to have thought of that!
In what has to be one of the most elegant and simple experiments I've seen in a long time, Yann Hautier, Pascal Niklaus and Andy Hector tested a basic mechanism of why nutrient enrichment results in species loss. This is a critically important issue as it has been repeatedly shown that while adding nitrogen to plant communities causes increases in productivity, species go locally extinct. We may bare witness to local diversity declines because human activity has greatly increased nutrient deposition. This pattern has been observed for a couple of decades, but the exact mechanism has never been adequately tested, with some camps believing that enrichment increases below-ground competition for other resources that become limiting, or above ground for light.As reveled in the most recent issue of Science, Hautier et al. performed an exceedingly simple experiment; they added light to the understory of plant communities with or without nitrogen additions. They made two compelling observations. First, when communities were enriched without elevated light, they lost about 3 of the 6 initial species compared to the control, while light addition in the enriched communities maintained the 6 member community (as did a light only treatment). The second result was that the light plus nitrogen treatment obtained much higher biomass than either the nitrogen or light only treatments, and in fact the light only treatment did not significantly increase productivity, meaning that the communities are not normally light-limited. Further, they failed to detect any elevated belowground competition for other resources.
These results reveal that nutrient enrichment causes diversity loss because increased plant size increases light competition and plants that grow taller with elevated nitrogen are better light competitors. An old problem solved with the right experiment.
Hautier, Y., Niklaus, P., & Hector, A. (2009). Competition for Light Causes Plant Biodiversity Loss After Eutrophication Science, 324 (5927), 636-638 DOI: 10.1126/science.1169640
2 comments:
Interesting methods. I really like the light addition treatment using fully enclosed fluorescent tubes (control) or half enclosed tubes (treatment) in a greenhouse. Very elegant.
A very nice experiment indeed, and consistent with what Stevens and Carson found ten years ago (Ecology 80:455-465) that nutrient addition results in an increase in biomass but decrease in the number of individual plants, and that loss in number of individuals can explain the loss in species richness.
But what about the negative productivity-richness pattern in phytoplankton? Perhaps there is still a mystery to be solved....
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