Impact of Drought on Desert Shrubs: Effects of Seasonality and Degree of Resource Island Development

Reynolds, James F.; Virginia, Ross A.; Kemp, Paul R.; Soyza, Amrita G. de; Tremmel, David C.

doi:10.2307/2657195

Cited by 195 publications

(272 citation statements)

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“…We do not have a quantitative record of rainfall after 1995 because BK's weather station was removed in 1994. Nevertheless, our qualitative record and the production of very few flowers and leaves in 1999 and 2000 by creosote (Larrea tridentata), a plant robust to drought stress (Reynolds et al 1999), indicate years of progressive drought.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 89%

Co-pollinators and specialization in the pollinating seed-consumer mutualism between senita cacti and senita moths

Holland

Fleming

2002

Oecologia

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Specialization of a plant on a particular pollinator may not evolve if co-pollinators are effective and abundant. This is particularly evident if fruit set is resource limited and cannot be increased above the levels produced by the actions of co-pollinators. The pollinating seed-consuming interaction between senita cacti and senita moths in the Sonoran Desert presents a paradox because it exhibits many traits resembling those of the highly specialized yucca/yucca moth system, but also involves co-pollinators. For 6 years, we studied how contributions of nocturnal senita moths and diurnal co-pollinating bees to fruit set depended on resource and pollen limitation, time of flower closing, and the onset and phenology of flowering. Fruit set was typically resource limited. Fruit set of flowers exposed only to senita moths was not different from resource-limited fruit set of control flowers. When only co-pollinating bees were allowed to visit flowers, however, fruit set became pollen limited. Only in one year when fruit set was pollen limited were bees able to increase fruit set beyond the level resulting from senita moth pollination. High temperatures commonly induced flowers to close before sunrise so that diurnal bees were unable to visit flowers. This was particularly important from 1998 to 2000, when flowering did not begin until late in spring when temperatures were already high enough to induce flowers to close before sunrise. Bees were typically functionally redundant with senita moths; excluding bees from visiting flowers did not alter fruit set. Nevertheless, extreme specialization of floral traits to exclude co-pollinators has not evolved in senita, possibly because there are times when bees do increase fruit set. This can occur when senita moths are rare, fruit set is pollen limited, cool temperatures prevent flowers from closing before sunrise, and flowering begins early in spring.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 89%

Co-pollinators and specialization in the pollinating seed-consumer mutualism between senita cacti and senita moths

Holland

Fleming

2002

Oecologia

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“…However, similar results have not been found in observational studies [78]. Contradictory responses of nitrogen (N) mineralization and availability to changes in water availability have also been reported [76,79,80]. Maestre et al [20] found that a 2.58C experimental warming enhanced soil CO 2 efflux, particularly in areas dominated by BSCs, in a semi-arid environment from Spain.…”

Section: Global Environmental Change Effects On Drylandsmentioning

confidence: 88%

It is getting hotter in here: determining and projecting the impacts of global environmental change on drylands

Maestre

Salguero‐Gómez

Quero

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

271

209

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Drylands occupy large portions of the Earth, and are a key terrestrial biome from the socio-ecological point of view. In spite of their extent and importance, the impacts of global environmental change on them remain poorly understood. In this introduction, we review some of the main expected impacts of global change in drylands, quantify research efforts on the topic, and highlight how the articles included in this theme issue contribute to fill current gaps in our knowledge. Our literature analyses identify key under-studied areas that need more research (e.g. countries such as Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Somalia, and deserts such as the Thar, Kavir and Taklamakan), and indicate that most global change research carried out to date in drylands has been done on a unidisciplinary basis. The contributions included here use a wide array of organisms (from micro-organisms to humans), spatial scales (from local to global) and topics (from plant demography to poverty alleviation) to examine key issues to the socio-ecological impacts of global change in drylands. These papers highlight the complexities and difficulties associated with the prediction of such impacts. They also identify the increased use of long-term experiments and multidisciplinary approaches as priority areas for future dryland research. Major advances in our ability to predict and understand global change impacts on drylands can be achieved by explicitly considering how the responses of individuals, populations and communities will in turn affect ecosystem services. Future research should explore linkages between these responses and their effects on water and climate, as well as the provisioning of services for human development and well-being.

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“…In desert regions, rainfall events exhibit temporal variability and are highly discontinuous and unpredictable (Noy-Meir 1973, Schwinning andSala 2004), which can trigger a cascade of responses that affect plant growth, reproduction and net ecosystem productivity (Reynolds et al 1999). It has also been predicted that rainfall will fluctuate more dramatically with increasing global climate change, in terms of increased contrast between arid and wet regions and between arid and wet seasons (IPCC 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extreme drought stress shifts net facilitation to neutral interactions between shrubs and sub‐canopy plants in an arid desert

Zhang

Zhao

Zhou

et al. 2017

Oikos

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The stress gradient hypothesis (SGH) predicts that the importance or intensity of competition and facilitation will change inversely along abiotic stress gradients. It was originally postulated that increasing environmental stress can induce a monotonic increase in facilitation. However, more recent models predicted that the relationship between severity and interaction exhibits a hump-shaped pattern, in which positive interactions prevail under moderate stress but decline at the extreme ends of stress gradients. In the present study, we conducted a field experiment along a temporal rainfall gradient for five consecutive years, in order to investigate interactions in a shrub-herbaceous plant community at the southern edge of the Badain Jaran Desert, and, more specifically, investigated the effects of Calligonum mongolicum, a dominant shrub species, on both abiotic environmental variables and the performance of sub-canopy plant species. We found that shrubs can improve sub-canopy water regimes, soil properties, plant biomass, density, cover, and richness and, more importantly, that the positive effect of shrubs on sub-canopy soil moisture during the summer diminishes as rainfall decreases, a pattern that partly explains the collapse of the positive interaction between shrubs and their understory plants. These results provide empirical evidence that the positive effect of shrubs on understory plant communities in extreme arid environments may decline and become neutral with increasing drought stress.

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Impact of Drought on Desert Shrubs: Effects of Seasonality and Degree of Resource Island Development

Cited by 195 publications

References 0 publications

Co-pollinators and specialization in the pollinating seed-consumer mutualism between senita cacti and senita moths

Co-pollinators and specialization in the pollinating seed-consumer mutualism between senita cacti and senita moths

It is getting hotter in here: determining and projecting the impacts of global environmental change on drylands

Extreme drought stress shifts net facilitation to neutral interactions between shrubs and sub‐canopy plants in an arid desert

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