Linking Changes to Intraspecific Trait Diversity to Community Functional Diversity and Biomass in Response to Snow and Nitrogen Addition Within an Inner Mongolian Grassland

Wei Mao, Andrew J. Felton, Tonghui Zhang

In recent years, both the intraspecific and interspecific functional diversity (FD) of plant communities have been studied with new approaches to improve an understanding about the mechanisms underlying plant species coexistence. Yet, little is known about how global change drivers will impact intraspecific FD and trait overlap among species, and in particular how this may scale to impacts on community level FD and ecosystem functioning. To address this uncertainty, we assessed the direct and indirect responses of specific leaf area (SLA) among both dominant annual and subordinate perennial species to the independent and interactive effects of nitrogen and snow addition within the Inner Mongnolian steppe. More specifically, we investigated the consequences for these responses on plant community FD, trait overlap and biomass. Nitrogen addition increased the biomass of the dominant annual species and as a result increased total community biomass. This occurred despite concurrent decreases in the biomass of subordinate perennial species. Nitrogen addition also increased intraspecific FD and trait overlap of both annual species and perennial species, and consequently increased the degree of trait overlap in SLA at the community level. However, snow addition did not significantly impact intraspecific FD and trait overlap of SLA for perennial species, but increased intraspecific FD and trait overlap of annual species, of which scaled to changes in community level FD. We found that the responses of the dominant annual species to nitrogen and snow additions were generally more sensitive than the subordinate perennial species within the inner Mongolian grassland communities of our study. As a consequence of this sensitivity, the responses of the dominant species largely drove impacts to community FD, trait overlap and community biomass. In total, our study demonstrates that the responses of dominant species in a community to environmental change may drive the initial trajectories of change to community FD and functioning.