CONCLUSIONS
Our study provides novel empirical evidence that nitrogen deposition and mowing, two common grassland management practices, can have vastly different effects on grassland biomass and structural stability. Nitrogen deposition mainly influenced grassland biomass stability, decreasing grassland biomass resistance and increasing biomass recovery. By contrast, mowing mainly influenced grassland structural stability, decreasing structural resistance and increasing structural recovery. These different effects, however, were both largely driven by the response of the most dominant species, L. chinensis , to drought, emphasizing the importance of elucidating dominant species traits that determine their stability for understanding community and ecosystem stability properties in the face of drought or other disturbance events. Our study also illustrates the necessity of considering stability across multiple levels of ecological organization to gain a more complete understanding of the effects of anthropogenic environmental changes on ecological ability.