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.