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New article: Number of simultaneously acting global change factors affects composition, diversity and productivity of grassland plant communities
Natural plant communities are increasingly more often exposed to multiple global change factors at the same time, but our understanding of how plant communities respond to simultaneously acting global change factors is still limited.
In an experiment performed at the University of Konstanz, we examined the responses of diverse plant communities to increasing numbers (0, 1, 2, 4 and 6) of global change factors, which included climate warming, eutrophication, fungicide and microplastic pollution, artificial light at night and salinization. Most importantly, this study showed that while global change drivers had limited impacts on plant community diversity when acting individually, plant diversity decreased with increasing numbers of co-acting global change drivers. These results thus suggest that the impacts of individual global change factors on natural plant communities become more severe when these communities are also exposed to other global change factors.