State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, China; Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Science and Ministry of Water Resource, Yangling, China
State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, China; Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Science and Ministry of Water Resource, Yangling, China
State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, China; Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Science and Ministry of Water Resource, Yangling, China
Jordi Sardans
Global Ecology Unit CREAF-CSIC-UAB, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Bellaterra, Spain; CREAF, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
Departamento de Biología y Geología, Física y Química Inorgánica, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Móstoles, Spain
Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo
Departamento de Biología y Geología, Física y Química Inorgánica, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Móstoles, Spain; Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado
Peter B Reich
Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, University of Western Sydney, Penrith, Australia; Department of Forest Resources, University of Minnesota, Minnesota, United States
Manipulative experiments and observations along environmental gradients, the two most common approaches to evaluate the impacts of climate change on nutrient cycling, are generally assumed to produce similar results, but this assumption has rarely been tested. We did so by conducting a meta-analysis and found that soil nutrients responded differentially to drivers of climate change depending on the approach considered. Soil carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus concentrations generally decreased with water addition in manipulative experiments but increased with annual precipitation along environmental gradients. Different patterns were also observed between warming experiments and temperature gradients. Our findings provide evidence of inconsistent results and suggest that manipulative experiments may be better predictors of the causal impacts of short-term (months to years) climate change on soil nutrients but environmental gradients may provide better information for long-term correlations (centuries to millennia) between these nutrients and climatic features. Ecosystem models should consequently incorporate both experimental and observational data to properly assess the impacts of climate change on nutrient cycling.
