Climate change shapes richness-evenness relationships in a subalpine grassland experiment

Abstract

Grasslands face an uncertain future due to climate change. Although there is increased interest in the interdependencies of different biodiversity components, the effects of climate change on these relationships remain understudied. One of these is the richness-evenness relationship (RER), which is sensitive to altered species abundances in relation to richness. This relationship may be important as evenness and richness jointly shape diverse ecosystem functions, such as stability and productivity. As evenness affects productivity differently in low and high richness communities, the richness-evenness relationship is important to investigate, especially under climate change. Here, we assess the effects of increased CO2 concentrations, temperature, and drought on the RER in a subalpine long-term (2010 - ongoing) grassland climate change experiment, and test whether these effects can be buffered by reseeding. We provide evidence that climate change alters the RER in our experiment, and that these changes occur independently of changes in richness and evenness separately. Reseeding erases the differences in RER between treatments and controls but fails to restore the negative RER initially found in controls. Further, we show that the dominant grass species in our system (Arrhenatherum elatius) responds differently to each climate change factor, with opposite effects in high vs. low richness plots, thereby largely determining the direction of the RER. These results suggest that the RER can reveal additional insights on community responses to climate change and represents a different signal than evenness or richness alone. A more nuanced approach integrating evenness and maximizing richness in seed mixtures could be an important step forward to better match restoration treatments to particular community types and global change drivers.