EEB Thursday Seminar Series - Synthesizing plant community responses to global change

Seminar Summary - Many global change factors, such as nitrogen deposition, herbivore losses, and species invasions, are occurring simultaneously worldwide. Ecologists have been tasked with forecasting community and ecosystem responses to these multiple concurrent drivers. My research focuses on plant community responses to multiple global change drivers, and whether these community shifts drive changes in ecosystem function. I will discuss the results of data synthesis efforts examining global patterns of plant community responses to altered resources and their consequences for primary productivity. The Community Responses to Resource Experiments (CoRRE) database includes 138 experiments from 70 locations globally and 2875 individual plant species with categorical and continuous traits. Through synthesis, we demonstrate that grassland communities are dynamically changing in their taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity in response to a wide variety of global change drivers, and that these changes have consequences for ecosystem function.