OSVALDO E. SALA results 49
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Shrub and grass soil‐resource partitioning as modulated by precipitation amount and size of individualNARA Subscribed
Plant‐root uptake underpins the flow of water and nutrients through terrestrial ecosystems. Water and nutrients are heterogeneously distributed in soil and vary among wet and dry years. Shrubs and grasses have different root distributions extending to different soil depths. We asked three questions: (1) What are the depth profiles of root absorption of the dominant shrub and grass species of the northern Chihuahuan drylands? (...
Climate change drivers elicit ecosystem responses that vary through time. We propose that the mismatch between equilibrium and transient ecosystem response defines ecological acclimation. As precipitation is expected to shift under climate change, we asked how both increases and decreases in water availability elicit ecological acclimation of the N cycle and how long does this acclimation take. Using foliar δ 15 N as a proxy f...
Biocrust Mosses and Cyanobacteria Exhibit Distinct Carbon Uptake Responses to Variations in Precipitation Amount and FrequencyNARA Subscribed
Dryland organisms exhibit varied responses to changes in precipitation, including event size, frequency, and soil moisture duration, influencing carbon uptake and reserve management strategies. This principle, central to the pulse‐reserve paradigm, has not been thoroughly evaluated in biological soil crusts (biocrusts), essential primary producers on dryland surfaces. We conducted two experiments to investigate carbon uptake i...
Cycles of plant growth, termed phenology, are tightly linked to environmental controls. The length of time spent growing, bounded by the start and end of season, is an important determinant of the global carbon, water, and energy balance. Much focus has been given to global warming and consequences for shifts in growing‐season length in temperate regions. In conjunction with warming temperatures, altered precipitation regimes...
Free‐living nematodes are one of the most diverse metazoan taxa in terrestrial ecosystems and are critical to the global soil carbon (C) cycling through their role in organic matter decomposition. They are highly dependent on water availability for movement, feeding, and reproduction. Projected changes in precipitation across temporal and spatial scales will affect free‐living nematodes and their contribution to C cycling with...
NEOTROPICAL ALIEN MAMMALS: a data set of occurrence and abundance of alien mammals in the NeotropicsNARA Subscribed
Biological invasion is one of the main threats to native biodiversity. For a species to become invasive, it must be voluntarily or involuntarily introduced by humans into a nonnative habitat. Mammals were among first taxa to be introduced worldwide for game, meat, and labor, yet the number of species introduced in the Neotropics remains unknown. In this data set, we make available occurrence and abundance data on mammal specie...
Primary production, a key regulator of the global carbon cycle, is highly responsive to variations in climate. Yet, a detailed, continental‐scale risk assessment of climate‐related impacts on primary production is lacking. We combined 16 years of MODIS NDVI data, a remotely sensed proxy for primary production, with observations from 1218 climate stations to derive values of ecosystem sensitivity to precipitation and aridity. F...
Effect of interannual precipitation variability on dryland productivity: A global synthesisNARA Subscribed
Climate‐change assessments project increasing precipitation variability through increased frequency of extreme events. However, the effects of interannual precipitation variance per se on ecosystem functioning have been largely understudied. Here, we report on the effects of interannual precipitation variability on the primary production of global drylands, which include deserts, steppes, shrublands, grasslands, and prairies a...
Regional grassland productivity responses to precipitation during multiyear above‐ and below‐average rainfall periodsNARA Subscribed
There is considerable uncertainty in the magnitude and direction of changes in precipitation associated with climate change, and ecosystem responses are also uncertain. Multiyear periods of above‐ and below‐average rainfall may foretell consequences of changes in rainfall regime. We compiled long‐term aboveground net primary productivity ( ANPP ) and precipitation ( PPT ) data for eight North American grasslands, and quantifie...
Temporal stability of ecosystem functioning increases the predictability and reliability of ecosystem services, and understanding the drivers of stability across spatial scales is important for land management and policy decisions. We used species‐level abundance data from 62 plant communities across five continents to assess mechanisms of temporal stability across spatial scales. We assessed how asynchrony (i.e. different uni...
Pushing precipitation to the extremes in distributed experiments: recommendations for simulating wet and dry yearsNARA Subscribed
Intensification of the global hydrological cycle, ranging from larger individual precipitation events to more extreme multiyear droughts, has the potential to cause widespread alterations in ecosystem structure and function. With evidence that the incidence of extreme precipitation years (defined statistically from historical precipitation records) is increasing, there is a clear need to identify ecosystems that are most vulne...
Global‐change drivers of ecosystem functioning modulated by natural variability and saturating responsesNARA Subscribed
Humans are altering global environment at an unprecedented rate through changes in biodiversity, climate, nitrogen cycle, and land use. To address their effects on ecosystem functioning, experiments most frequently explore one driver at a time and control as many confounding factors as possible. Yet, which driver exerts the largest influence on ecosystem functioning and whether their relative importance changes among systems r...
Few multiyear precipitation–reduction experiments find a shift in the productivity–precipitation relationshipNARA Subscribed
Well‐defined productivity–precipitation relationships of ecosystems are needed as benchmarks for the validation of land models used for future projections. The productivity–precipitation relationship may be studied in two ways: the spatial approach relates differences in productivity to those in precipitation among sites along a precipitation gradient (the spatial fit, with a steeper slope); the temporal approach relates inter...
Although precipitation interannual variability is projected to increase due to climate change, effects of changes in precipitation variance have received considerable less attention than effects of changes in the mean state of climate. Interannual precipitation variability effects on functional diversity and its consequences for ecosystem functioning are assessed here using a 6‐year rainfall manipulation experiment. Five preci...
Characterizing differences in precipitation regimes of extreme wet and dry years: implications for climate change experimentsNARA Subscribed
Climate change is intensifying the hydrologic cycle and is expected to increase the frequency of extreme wet and dry years. Beyond precipitation amount, extreme wet and dry years may differ in other ways, such as the number of precipitation events, event size, and the time between events. We assessed 1614 long‐term (100 year) precipitation records from around the world to identify key attributes of precipitation regimes, besid...
Soil animal responses to moisture availability are largely scale, not ecosystem dependent: insight from a cross‐site studyNARA Subscribed
Climate change will result in reduced soil water availability in much of the world either due to changes in precipitation or increased temperature and evapotranspiration. How communities of mites and nematodes may respond to changes in moisture availability is not well known, yet these organisms play important roles in decomposition and nutrient cycling processes. We determined how communities of these organisms respond to cha...
Precipitation legacies in desert grassland primary production occur through previous‐year tiller densityNARA Subscribed
In arid ecosystems, current‐year precipitation often explains only a small proportion of annual aboveground net primary production (ANPP). We hypothesized that lags in the response of ecosystems to changes in water availability explain this low explanatory power, and that lags result from legacies from transitions from dry to wet years or the reverse. We explored five hypotheses regarding the magnitude of legacies, two possibl...