Effects of Multiple Resource Additions on Community and Ecosystem Processes: NutNet Seasonal Biomass and Seasonal and Annual NPP Data at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico

Two of the most pervasive human impacts on ecosystems are alteration of global nutrient budgets and changes in the abundance and identity of consumers. Fossil fuel combustion and agricultural fertilization have doubled and quintupled, respectively, global pools of nitrogen and phosphorus relative to pre-industrial levels. In spite of the global impacts of these human activities, there have been no globally coordinated experiments to quantify the general impacts on ecological systems. This experiment seeks to determine how nutrient availability controls plant biomass, diversity, and species composition in a desert grassland. This has important implications for understanding how future atmospheric deposition of nutrients (N, S, Ca, K) might affect community and ecosystem-level responses. This study is part of a larger coordinated research network that includes more than 40 grassland sites around the world. By using a standardized experimental setup that is consistent across all study sites, we are addressing the questions of whether diversity and productivity are co-limited by multiple nutrients and if so, whether these trends are predictable on a global scale.Above-ground net primary production is the change in plant biomass, represented by stems, flowers, fruit and and foliage, over time and incoporates growth as well as loss to death and decomposition. To measure this change the vegetation variables, including species composition and the cover and height of individuals, are sampled twice yearly (spring and fall) at permanent 1m x 1m plots within each site. Volumetric measurements are made using vegetation data from permanent plots (SEV231, "Effects of Multiple Resource Additions on Community and Ecosystem Processes: NutNet NPP Quadrat Sampling") and regressions correlating species biomass and volume constructed using seasonal harvest weights from SEV157, "Net Primary Productivity (NPP) Weight Data."