Volume 29, Issue 23 p. 6741-6755
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Herbivory and elevated levels of CO2 and nutrients separately, rather than synergistically, impacted biomass production and allocation in invasive and native plant species

Liping Shan

Liping Shan

Key Laboratory of Wetland Ecology and Environment, State Key Laboratory of Black Soils Conservation and Utilization, Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, China

Contribution: ​Investigation, Methodology, Validation, Writing - original draft

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Ayub M. O. Oduor

Ayub M. O. Oduor

Key Laboratory of Wetland Ecology and Environment, State Key Laboratory of Black Soils Conservation and Utilization, Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, China

Department of Applied Biology, Technical University of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya

Contribution: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Writing - review & editing

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Yanjie Liu

Corresponding Author

Yanjie Liu

Key Laboratory of Wetland Ecology and Environment, State Key Laboratory of Black Soils Conservation and Utilization, Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, China

Correspondence

Yanjie Liu, Key Laboratory of Wetland Ecology and Environment, State Key Laboratory of Black Soils Conservation and Utilization, Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130102, China.

Email: [email protected]

Contribution: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Supervision, Writing - review & editing

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First published: 10 October 2023
Citations: 2

Abstract

Large parts of the Earth are experiencing environmental change caused by alien plant invasions, rising atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2), and nutrient enrichments. Elevated CO2 and nutrient concentrations can separately favour growth of invasive plants over that of natives but how herbivory may modulate the magnitude and direction of net responses by the two groups of plants to simultaneous CO2 and nutrient enrichments remains unknown. In line with the enemy release hypothesis, invasive plant species should reallocate metabolites from costly anti-herbivore defences into greater growth following escape from intense herbivory in the native range. Therefore, invasive plants should have greater growth than native plants under simultaneous CO2 and nutrient enrichments in the absence of herbivory. To test this prediction, we grew nine congeneric pairs of invasive and native plant species that naturally co-occurred in grasslands in China under two levels each of nutrient enrichment (low-nutrient vs. high-nutrient), herbivory (with herbivory vs. without herbivory) and under ambient (412.9 ± 0.6 ppm) and elevated (790.1 ± 6.2 ppm) levels of CO2 concentrations in open top chambers in a common garden. Elevated CO2 and nutrient enrichment separately increased total plant biomass, while herbivory reduced it regardless of the plant invasive status. High-nutrient treatment caused the plants to allocate a significantly lower proportion of total biomass to roots, while herbivory induced an opposite pattern. Herbivory suppressed total biomass production more strongly in native plants than invasive plants. The plants exhibited significant interspecific and intergeneric variation in their responses to the various treatment combinations. Overall, these results suggest that elevated CO2 and nutrients and herbivory may separately, rather than synergistically, impact productivity of the invasive and co-occurring native plant species in our study system. Moreover, interspecific variation in resource-use strategies was more important than invasive status in determining plant responses to the various treatment combinations.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

There is no conflict of interest in this submission, and all authors have approved the manuscript for publication.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data that support the findings of this study are available from Dryad at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tx95x6b45.

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