Data and code from: Plant species responses to nutrient addition, but not to herbivore exclusion, strengthen over time in global grasslands

Le résumé fourni par la source

Nutrient enrichment and altered herbivory are among the most pervasive drivers of change in grasslands worldwide, yet how their effects on plant communities accumulate or fade over time, and which species drive those effects, remains poorly resolved. Using long-term data from the Nutrient Network (NutNet), a globally distributed experiment, we examined how grassland plant community composition responded to factorial nutrient addition (NPK) and herbivore exclusion (fencing) across 98 sites and up to 12 years of treatment. For each site and year, we quantified the overall compositional difference between treatments (PERMANOVA), identified the species contributing most to those differences (SIMPER), and classified species as indicators of each treatment (Indicator Species Analysis), linking these responses to each species' dominance, commonness, functional group, lifespan, and provenance. We found that compositional divergence under nutrient addition strengthened over time and was driven disproportionately by a relatively small subset of species, particularly dominant and common ones, whereas the effects of herbivore exclusion were comparatively weak and transient. These results highlight the importance of species-level dynamics for understanding how grassland biodiversity responds to global change. This package provides the processed data and annotated R code needed to reproduce all analyses and figures in the associated study.

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