[PCA] Middle-Eastern plant communities tolerate 9 years of drought in a multi-site climate manipulation experiment

[De Angelis, Patricia]

This study presents interesting results concerning climate change and
drought tolerance in dryland plant species was conducted outside the United
States but the information could be informative to research in the US as
well.

Should we really be surprised that dryland plant species have drought
tolerance...?

Patricia S. De Angelis, Ph.D.
Botanist, US Fish & Wildlife Service-Division of Scientific Authority
Chair, Plant Conservation Alliance-Medicinal Plant Working Group

Middle-Eastern plant communities tolerate 9 years of drought in a
multi-site climate manipulation experiment
Tielboerger, et al. 2014 Nature Communications 5:5102

Abstract
For evaluating climate change impacts on biodiversity, extensive
experiments are urgently needed to complement popular non-mechanistic
models which map future ecosystem properties onto their current climatic
niche. Here, we experimentally test the main prediction of these models by
means of a novel multi-site approach. We implement rainfall
manipulations—irrigation and drought—to dryland plant communities situated
along a steep climatic gradient in a global biodiversity hotspot containing
many wild progenitors of crops. Despite the large extent of our study,
spanning nine plant generations and many species, very few differences
between treatments were observed in the vegetation response variables:
biomass, species composition, species richness and density. The lack of a
clear drought effect challenges studies classifying dryland ecosystems as
most vulnerable to global change. We attribute this resistance to the
tremendous temporal and spatial heterogeneity under which the plants have
evolved, concluding that this should be accounted for when predicting
future biodiversity change.

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141006/ncomms6102/full/ncomms6102.html?WT.ec_id=NCOMMS-20141008
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