Plant Soil Environ., 2020, 66(1):47-56 | DOI: 10.17221/543/2019-PSE

Clipping defoliation eliminates the stimulating effects of nitrogen enrichment on the aboveground productivity of an alpine meadowOriginal Paper

Ning Zong*,1, Peili Shi1,2
1 Lhasa National Ecological Research Station, Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modelling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China
2 College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China

To investigate how clipping (CL) regulates the effects of nutrient addition, an experiment, including CL and nitrogen (N) addition, was conducted in an alpine meadow. Nitrogen treatment increased community coverage (48-113% higher than the control) and aboveground biomass (29-117% higher than the control), which was mainly attributed to grass growth. Both N and N + CL treatments showed a tendency to reducing species richness, while significant reduction only occurred in 2016 and 2017 in CL treatment. Clipping showed a tendency to decrease community cover (3-37% lower than the control) and aboveground biomass (2-34% lower than the control), while N + CL treatment had no effect, indicating that clipping can eliminate the simulated effects of N addition. Nitrogen addition significantly increased soil inorganic N (SIN, 528-1230% higher than the control), while SIN in N + CL was 25-48% lower than N treatment. The decrease in stimulated effects in N + CL was attributed to SIN decrease, which resulted from the aboveground biomass removal by clipping. Our results show that clipping can take away aboveground biomass and cause soil nutrients to decrease, which slows down the degraded grassland recovery. This suggests that grazing exclusion may eliminate the effect of nitrogen deposition on aboveground production in alpine grasslands.

Keywords: compensatory growth; nutrient improvement; plant functional group; selective clipping; Tibetan Plateau

Published: January 31, 2020  Show citation

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Zong N, Shi P. Clipping defoliation eliminates the stimulating effects of nitrogen enrichment on the aboveground productivity of an alpine meadow. Plant Soil Environ. 2020;66(1):47-56. doi: 10.17221/543/2019-PSE.
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