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Humans dominate many important Earth system processes including the nitrogen (N) cycle. Atmospheric N deposition affects fundamental processes such as carbon cycling, climate regulation, and biodiversity, and could result in changes to fundamental Earth system processes such as primary production. Both modelling and experimentation have suggested a role for anthropogenically altered N deposition in increasing productivity, nevertheless, current understanding of the relative strength of N deposition with respect to other controls on production such as edaphic conditions and climate is limited. Here we use an international multiscale data set to show that atmospheric N deposition is positively correlated to aboveground net primary production (ANPP) observed at the 1-m2 level across a wide range of herbaceous ecosystems. N deposition was a better predictor than climatic drivers and local soil conditions, explaining 16% of observed variation in ANPP globally with an increase of 1 kg N·ha−1·yr−1 increasing ANPP by 3%. Soil pH explained 8% of observed variation in ANPP while climatic drivers showed no significant relationship. Our results illustrate that the incorporation of global N deposition patterns in Earth system models are likely to substantially improve estimates of primary production in herbaceous systems. In herbaceous systems across the world, humans appear to be partially driving local ANPP through impacts on the N cycle.
This work was generated using data from the Nutrient Network experiment, funded at the site scale by individual researchers. Coordination and data management have been supported by funding to E. T. Borer and E. W. Seabloom from the National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network (NSF-DEB-1042132) and Long Term Ecological Research (NSF-DEB-1234162 to Cedar Creek LTER) programs, and the Institute on the Environment (DG-0001-13). We also thank the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute for hosting project data and the Institute on the Environment for hosting Network meetings. C. J. Stevens and E. M. Lind contributed equally to this work.
Appendix B and a Supplement are available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/14-1902.1.sm
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/rebecca_mcculley/58/
Published in Ecology, v. 96, no. 6, p. 1459-1465.
Copyright by the Ecological Society of America. Carly J. Stevens, Eric M. Lind, Yann Hautier, W. Stanley Harpole, Elizabeth T. Borer, Sarah Hobbie, Eric W. Seabloom, Laura Ladwig, Jonathan D. Bakker, Chengjin Chu, Scott Collins, Kendi F. Davies, Jennifer Firn, Helmut Hillebrand, Kimberly J. La Pierre, Andrew MacDougall, Brett Melbourne, Rebecca L. McCulley, John Morgan, John L. Orrock, Suzanne M. Prober, Anita C. Risch, Martin Schuetz, and Peter D. Wragg 2015. Anthropogenic nitrogen deposition predicts local grassland primary production worldwide. Ecology 96:1459–1465. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/14-1902.1
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