Artikel bekijken

Both nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) enrichment are known to impact plant diversity globally. Recent studies suggest that P enrichment may be as important, or even more important, as a driver of terrestrial plant species loss as N enrichment. However, the generality and relative contribution of these critical nutrients to species losses remains unclear. Here, we quantitatively compared effects of N, P and combined NP enrichment on species richness of natural and semi-natural herbaceous ecosystems across the world in a meta-analysis of 189 long-term nutrient addition experiments in the field. Our experiment-based approach shows that, across terrestrial and wetland ecosystems, N and NP enrichment had widespread and strong negative effects on plant species richness. N reduced plant species richness across experiments by on average 16% (p < 0.001), while P did not (on average 3%, NS). Combined NP …