Deciphering the stability of grassland productivity in response to rainfall manipulation experiments

Aim: Rainfall manipulation experiments are essential tools for deciphering mechanisms leading to variation in ecosystem stability across sites. Here, we gathered articles reporting results of experimental droughts on grasslands above-ground biomass: to identify which indices have been used to assess stability, to evaluate the overall grassland responses to drought, and to quantify the relative importance of drought characteristics and climatic conditions on explaining variation in stability.

Location: Global

Time period: 1989-2018

Major taxa studied: Grasslands

Methods: We used meta-analysis approaches to evaluate overall grassland stability in terms of resistance, recovery and resilience, and multi-model inference to assess the relative importance of different moderators on explaining variability on those three stability properties.

Results: Numerous indices of stability have been used, but they are inadequate for comparisons across sites. After applying standardized ind...