THE ROLE OF LONG-TERM EXPERIMENTS IN VALIDATING TRAIT-BASED APPROACHES TO ACHIEVING MULTIFUNCTIONALITY IN GRASSLANDS

Highlights

● Data from the Park Grass Experiment shows inherent trade-offs between species richness, biomass production and soil organic carbon.

● Soil organic carbon is positively correlated with biomass production that increases with fertilizer additions.

● Variance in outcomes can be understood in terms of the dominant ecological strategies of the plant communities indicated by functional traits.

● There was an indication that data on traits associated with the spatiotemporal pattern of resource capture could be used to design species mixtures with greater resource use complementarity, increasing species richness without sacrificing productivity.

● Variance in soil organic carbon was positively correlated with pH.

Abstract

Quantifying the relationships between plant functional traits and ecosystem services has been promoted as an approach to achieving multifunctional grassland systems that balance productivity with other regulating, supporting and cultural services. Establishing trade-offs and synergies between traits and services has largely relied on meta-analyses of studies from different systems and environments. This study demonstrated the value of focused studies of long-term experiments in grassland systems that measure traits and services in the same space and time to better understand the ecological constraints underlying these trade-offs and synergies. An analysis is presented that uses data from the Park Grass Experiment at Rothamsted Research on above-ground productivity, species richness and soil organic carbon stocks to quantify the relationships between these three outcomes and the power of variance in plant functional traits in explaining them. There was a trade-off between plots with high productivity, nitrogen inputs and soil organic carbon and plots with high species richness that was explained by a functional gradient of traits that are indicative of contrasting strategies of resource acquisition of resource conservation. Examples were identified of using functional traits to identify opportunities for mitigating these trade-offs and moving toward more multifunctional systems.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

multifunctional grassland systems / Park Grass Experiment / soil organic carbon / ecosystem service

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Supplementary materials

The online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.15302/J-FASE-2021438 contains supplementary materials (Figs. S1–S3; Tables S1–S2).

Acknowledgements

The Rothamsted Long-term Experiments National Capability is supported by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBS/E/C/000J0300) and the Lawes Agricultural Trust. This research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council under research program NE/N018125/1 LTS-M ASSIST—Achieving Sustainable Agricultural Systems.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Jonathan Storkey and Andrew J. Macdonald declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any study with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2022. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)