| Literature DB >> 23565170 |
Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo1, Fernando T Maestre, Antonio Gallardo, José L Quero, Victoria Ochoa, Miguel García-Gómez, Cristina Escolar, Pablo García-Palacios, Miguel Berdugo, Enrique Valencia, Beatriz Gozalo, Zouhaier Noumi, Mchich Derak, Matthew D Wallenstein.
Abstract
While much is known about the factors that control each component of the terrestrial nitrogen (N) cycle, it is less clear how these factors affect total N availability, the sum of organic and inorganic forms potentially available to microorganisms and plants. This is particularly true for N-poor ecosystems such as drylands, which are highly sensitive to climate change and desertification processes that can lead to the loss of soil nutrients such as N. We evaluated how different climatic, abiotic, plant and nutrient related factors correlate with N availability in semiarid Stipa tenacissima grasslands along a broad aridity gradient from Spain to Tunisia. Aridity had the strongest relationship with N availability, suggesting the importance of abiotic controls on the N cycle in drylands. Aridity appeared to modulate the effects of pH, plant cover and organic C (OC) on N availability. Our results suggest that N transformation rates, which are largely driven by variations in soil moisture, are not the direct drivers of N availability in the studied grasslands. Rather, the strong relationship between aridity and N availability could be driven by indirect effects that operate over long time scales (decades to millennia), including both biotic (e.g. plant cover) and abiotic (e.g. soil OC and pH). If these factors are in fact more important than short-term effects of precipitation on N transformation rates, then we might expect to observe a lagged decrease in N availability in response to increasing aridity. Nevertheless, our results suggest that the increase in aridity predicted with ongoing climate change will reduce N availability in the Mediterranean basin, impacting plant nutrient uptake and net primary production in semiarid grasslands throughout this region.Entities:
Mesh:
Substances:
Year: 2013 PMID: 23565170 PMCID: PMC3614980 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0059807
Source DB: PubMed Journal: PLoS One ISSN: 1932-6203 Impact factor: 3.240
Figure 1Relationships between total nitrogen (N) availability and aridity, pH, plant-ax1 (first component of a PCA including the cover of bare and plant microsites, average plant patch interdistance, area of plant patches and number of plant patches per 10 m of transect) and organic carbon for both Stipa tenassicima (STIPA) and Bare ground (BS) microsites.
Every data point is the average of five replicated soil samples. Significance levels are as follows: *p<0.05, **p<0.01 and ***p<0.001.
Figure 2Relative importance of aridity, pH, organic C, and plant-ax1 (first component of a PCA including the cover of bare and plant microsites, average plant patch interdistance, area of plant patches and number of plant patches per 10 m of transect) variables as drivers of variations in N availability.
Results are shown for: i) bare ground microsites, and ii) Stipa tenacissima microsites. The height of each bar is the sum of the Akaike weights of all models that included the predictor of interest, taking into account the number of models in which each predictor appears.
Top eight best-fitting regression models, ranked according to their AICc value, are presented.
| BARE | |||||||
| Aridity | pH | Plant-ax1 | Organic-C | R2 | AICc | ΔAIC | Wi |
| X | 0.635 | 146.24 | 0 | 0.31 | |||
| X | X | 0.673 | 146.89 | 0.64 | 0.22 | ||
| X | X | 0.658 | 147.82 | 1.58 | 0.14 | ||
| X | X | 0.638 | 149.09 | 2.85 | 0.07 | ||
| X | X | X | 0.68 | 149.8 | 3.55 | 0.05 | |
| X | X | X | 0.674 | 150.17 | 3.92 | 0.04 | |
| X | 0.561 | 150.31 | 4.07 | 0.03 | |||
| X | X | 0.605 | 151.01 | 4.77 | 0.04 | ||
|
| |||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| X | X | 0.82 | 145.83 | 0 | 0.41 | ||
| X | 0.77 | 148.32 | 2.49 | 0.12 | |||
| X | 0.76 | 148.51 | 2.68 | 0.11 | |||
| X | X | X | 0.82 | 149.03 | 3.2 | 0.08 | |
| X | X | X | 0.82 | 149.09 | 3.27 | 0.08 | |
| X | X | 0.79 | 149.2 | 3.37 | 0.08 | ||
| X | X | 0.77 | 151 | 5.17 | 0.03 | ||
| X | X | 0.77 | 151.28 | 5.45 | 0.01 |
AICc measures the relative goodness of fit of a given model; the lower its value, the more likely the model to be correct. Aridity, pH, plant-ax1 and organic C were included in these models. Bare = data from bare ground soils only, and Stipa = data from Stipa tenacissima soils only.
Figure 3Structural equation models showing the direct and indirect effects of aridity and organic carbon on the total nitrogen availability for the Stipa tenacissima (STIPA) and bare ground (BARE SOIL) microsites.
Continuous and dashed arrows indicate positive and negative relationships, respectively. Width of arrows is proportional to the strength of path coefficients. The proportion of variance explained (R2) appears above every response variable in the model. Goodness-of-fit statistics for each model are shown in the lower right corner. Significance levels are as follows: *p<0.05, **p<0.01 and ***p<0.001.