Vascular plant removal effects on biological N fixation vary across a boreal forest island gradient

• Published in: Ecology
• Main Authors: Gundale, Michael J., Wardle, David A., Nilsson, Marie-Charlotte
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2010
• Subjects: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics; Forest Island; Northern Sweden
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/09-0709.1; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1890%2F09-0709.1; https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1890/09-0709.1

There is currently much interest in understanding how biodiversity loss affects the functioning of ecosystems, but few studies have evaluated how ecosystem processes change in response to one another following biodiversity loss. We focused on a well‐described gradient of 30 forested lake islands in northern Sweden, where island size determines the occurrence of lightning‐ignited wildfire, which in turn determines successional stage, plant species composition, and productivity. We investigated the effect of biodiversity loss on biological nitrogen fixation by feathermosses through an experiment consisting of factorial removals of three understory shrub species ( Vaccinium myrtillis , Vaccinium vitis‐idaea , and Empetrum hermaphroditum ) and two plant functional groups (shrubs and tree roots). We tested the hypothesis that, following vascular plant species loss, N fixation rates would be impaired by changes in pools or processes that increase extractable soil N, because changes in the supply rate of N to feathermosses should influence their demand for newly fixed N. Further, we hypothesized that the effects of removals on N fixation would depend on environmental context (i.e., island size), because it has been previously demonstrated that the effect of vascular plant species removal on N recycling pools and processes was strongest on productive islands. The data demonstrated that removal of two shrub species ( V. vitis‐idaea and E. hermaphroditum ) negatively affected the N fixation of Hylocomium splendens , but positively affected Pleurozium schreberi , resulting in unchanged areal N fixation rates. In the functional removal experiment, tree root removal resulted in a significant negative effect on N fixation. The effects of shrub and root removals on N fixation occurred only on small islands and thus were context dependent. This pattern did not correspond to the effect of shrub and root removal treatments on N‐recycling pools or processes, which only occurred in response to specific vascular plant removals on ...