Under climate change, extreme droughts will limit water availability for plants. However, the species-specific responses make it difficult to draw general conclusions. We hypothesized that changes in species' abundance in response to extreme drought can be best explained by a set of water economic traits under ambient conditions in combination with the ability to adjust these traits towards higher drought resistance. We conducted a 4-year field experiment in temperate grasslands using rainout shelters with 30% and 50% rainfall reduction. We quantified the response as the change in species abundance between ambient conditions and the rainfall reduction. Abundance response to extreme drought was best explained by a combination of traits in ambient conditions and their functional adjustment, most likely reflecting plasticity. Smaller leaved species decreased less in abundance under drought. With increasing drought intensity, we observed a shift from drought tolerance, i.e., an increase in leaf dry matter content, to avoidance, i.e., a less negative turgor loss point (TLP) in ambient conditions and a constancy in TLP under drought. We stress the importance of using a multidimensional approach of variation in multiple traits and the importance of considering a range of drought intensities to improve predictions of species' response to climate change.

Botany Department State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart Stuttgart Germany

Department of Environmental Sciences University of Basel Basel Switzerland

Institute of Botany BOKU Vienna Austria

Institute of Botany Czech Academy of Science Prague Czech Republic

Plant Ecology Group University of Tübingen Tübingen Germany

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Effect of climate extremes and grazing on functional traits of a grassland community: insights from a 20-year experiment

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