PS 20-70 - Warming and increasing precipitation enhance the quality of alpine rangeland on the Tibetan Plateau

Wednesday, August 10, 2016
ESA Exhibit Hall, Ft Lauderdale Convention Center
Wei Xu, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China, Jin-Sheng He, Department of Ecology, Peking University, Beijing, China and Zhenhua Zhang, Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xining 810008, China
Background/Question/Methods

The Tibetan Plateau (TP), as one of the largest native grazing systems in the world, its rangeland quality is critical for China’s livestock husbandry. However, we know little about the sensitivity of rangeland quality on ongoing climate change in these cold regions. To explore the consequences of climate change on the variation of rangeland quality, we investigated forage production and quality by using a field two-factor experiment with warming (+1.5~1.8℃) and altered precipitation (wetting: +50% and drought: -50%) in an alpine grassland on the TP.

Results/Conclusions

We found that warming had no effect on forage production, but improved rangeland quality by increasing forage quality due to enhancement of crude protein and cell soluble content. In the meantime, drought treatment decreased rangeland quality through a significantly reduction of forage production by 14.6%, although it elevated forage quality by reducing cellulose content. While, wetting treatment increased forage production by 12.3% and had no effect on forage quality, which lead to a rise in rangeland quality. Compared with control, the combination effect of warming and wetting significantly increased forage production and had no effect on community nutrients content.Our findings suggest that the rangelands on the TP may be not so vulnerable to climate change, on the contrary, warming accompany with increasing precipitation projected in the future probably will improve rangeland quality.