Perez, S. 2025. Resilience mechanisms of grassland plant communities to global change. Dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.

Human-driven global environmental changes are exposing plants to novel, stressful conditions. To maintain the ecosystem services conferred by plants and predict future responses, it is critical to understand the factors influencing plant population acclimation, and community and ecosystem resilience. My dissertation research investigates plant community resilience to global changes and considers how resilience-promoting properties may be impacted by compounding global changes.To this end, I explored the impacts of drought and wet extremes (collectively, “precipitation events”), which are typically studied independently, in a perennial grassland system. I uncovered how precipitation events, which may not necessarily impact primary productivity directly (e.g., on average, wet events did not alter productivity), can still cryptically influence resilience via shifts in resilience-promoting properties of the plant community. I then considered the utility of plant “community properties” (characterizing a community by species composition) versus “functional properties” (characterizing a community by functional traits) in explaining primary productivity resilience. This work demonstrated that the utility of functional properties in explaining the resilience of ecosystem functioning may depend on the resilience attribute under consideration. Moreover, functional properties may be useful for identifying traits promoting resilience. In another grassland system, I explored the role of phenotypic plasticity—the capacity to shift traits in response to an environmental cue—in plant acclimation to individual and coupled global changes. I then linked plasticity to responses of plant populations experiencing the same global changes to consider how plasticity may mediate population-level responses and stability under global change. This research highlights that plastic responses in commonly measured plant functional traits are more variable than expected and thus, may be difficult to link to population-level responses. Taken together, my dissertation underscores the need to consider resilience and acclimation mechanisms within the context of simultaneous global changes.

Associated Datatables:

1. REX ANPP

Associated Treatment Areas:

• T7 Early Successional

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