Global change in above-belowground multitrophic grassland communities

Abstract

Global change is transforming Earth’s ecological communities with severe consequences for the functions and services they provide. In temperate grasslands, home to a mesmerising diversity of invertebrates controlling multiple ecosystem processes and services, land-use intensification and climate change are two of the most important global-change drivers. While we know a lot about their independent effects on grassland biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, little is known about how these stressors interact. Moreover, most research on biodiversity change focuses on decreasing biomass or species richness, while a major aspect is commonly ignored – altered ecological interactions. This is problematic because these interactions represent and control many important ecosystem processes, such as predation, herbivory or decomposition. Networks of trophic interactions, so-called food webs, link the structure and functioning of ecological communities and unravel mechanistic relationships between environmental change, ecological communities and ecosystem multifunctionality – the ability of a system to simultaneously support multiple processes. Consequently, we need to study how ecological interactions and the food webs they comprise respond to environmental change and to multiple interacting global-change drivers. Fortunately, novel tools offer unprecedented opportunities in studying trophic interactions and their impact on ecosystem processes. In addition, we know far more about how global change impacts the aboveground world than its belowground counterpart. However, belowground communities are just as important for the overall functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. Thus, to comprehensively understand global-change impacts on temperate grasslands, we need to study above- and belowground multitrophic interactions and ecosystem processes together, also accounting for their interdependencies. Here, we propose to use the Global Change Experimental Facility (GCEF, Bad Lauchstädt, Germany) to study joint impacts of land-use intensity and climate change on above-belowground multitrophic interactions and ecosystem multifunctionality in a temperate grassland global-change experiment. We will combine novel approaches to assessing trophic interactions and basal-resource dependency with an innovative method to quantify energy flux through ecological interaction networks. We will disentangle separate and interactive effects of land use and climate change and unravel how global-change driven modifications in multitrophic interactions mechanistically translate into altered ecosystem processes and multifunctionality – above and below the ground. Combining a field-experimental approach with novel molecular and quantitative techniques will allow for a leap forward in our understanding of global-change impacts on temperate grasslands, which will be crucial to manage and conserve these important ecosystems.