Plant community responses to long-term fertilization: changes in functional group abundance drive changes in species richness

Declines in species richness due to fertilization are typically rapid and associated with increases in aboveground production. However, in a long-term experiment examining the impacts of fertilization in an early successional community, we found it took 14 years for plant species richness to significantly decline in fertilized plots, despite fertilization causing a rapid increase in aboveground production. To determine what accounted for this lag in the species richness response, we examined several potential mechanisms. We found evidence suggesting the abundance of one functional group—tall species with long-distance (runner) clonality—drove changes in species richness, and we found little support for other mechanisms. Tall runner species initially increased in abundance due to fertilization, then declined dramatically and were not abundant again until later in the experiment, when species richness and the combined biomass of all other functional groups (non-tall runner) declined. Over...