Warming alters plant phylogenetic and functional community structure

Climate change is known to affect many facets of the Earth’s ecosystems. However, little is known about its impacts on phylogenetic and functional properties of ecological communities.
Here we studied the responses of plant communities in an alpine grassland on the Tibetan Plateau to environmental warming across taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional levels in a six-year multiple-level warming experiment.
While low-level warming did not alter either plant species richness or phylogenetic/functional community structure, high-level warming significantly decreased species richness. Higher-level warming more strongly reduced soil moisture and caused stronger environmental filtering, consequently changing species composition and community structure. At the plant functional trait level, high-level warming promoted species turnover through altering the effects of traits such as plant height on species extinction and specific leaf area on species colonization. As a result, high-, but ...