Background: Numerous studies have shown that nitrogen (N) deposition decreases biodiversity in terrestrial ecosystems. To explain the N-induced species loss, three functionally based hypotheses have been proposed: the aboveground competition hypothesis, the belowground competition hypothesis, and the total competition hypothesis. However, none of them is supported sufficiently by field experiments. A main challenge to testing these hypotheses is to ascertain the role of shoot and root competition in controlling plant responses to N enrichment. Simultaneously examining both aboveground and belowground responses in natural ecosystems is logistically complex, and has rarely been done.

Methodology/Principal Findings: In a two-year N addition experiment conducted in a natural grassland ecosystem, we investigated both above- and belowground responses of plants at the individual, species, and community levels. Plants differed significantly in their responses to N addition across the different organizational levels. The community-level species loss was mainly due to the loss of perennial grasses and forbs, while the relative abundance of plant species was dependent mainly on individual-level responses. Plasticity in biomass allocation was much smaller within a species than between species, providing a biological basis for explaining the functionally based species loss. All species increased biomass allocation to aboveground parts, but species with high belowground allocations were replaced by those with high aboveground allocations, indicating that the increased aboveground competition was the key process responsible for the observed diversity loss after N addition in this grassland ecosystem.

Conclusions/Significance: Our findings shed new light on the validity of the three competing hypotheses concerning species loss in response to N enrichment. They also have important implications for predicting the future impacts of N deposition on the structure and functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. In addition, we have developed a new technique for ascertaining the roles of aboveground and belowground competition in determining plant responses to N fertilization.

Plant phenological records are crucial for predicting plant responses to global warming. However, many historical records are either short or replete with data gaps, which pose limitations and may lead to erroneous conclusions about the direction and magnitude of change. In addition to uninterrupted monitoring, missing observations may be substituted via modeling, experimentation, or gradient analysis. Here we have developed a space-for-time (SFT) substitution method that uses spatial phenology and temperature data to fill gaps in historical records. To do this, we combined historical data for several tree species from a single location with spatial data for the same species and used linear regression and Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) to build complementary spring phenology models and assess improvements achieved by the approach. SFT substitution allowed increasing the sample size and developing more robust phenology models for some of the species studied. Testing models with reduced historical data size revealed thresholds at which SFT improved historical trend estimation. We conclude that under certain circumstances both the robustness of models and accuracy of phenological trends can be enhanced although some limitations and assumptions still need to be resolved. There is considerable potential for exploring SFT analyses in phenology studies, especially those conducted in urban environments and those dealing with non-linearities in phenology modeling.

Urbanization is the most dramatic form of land use change that has profoundly influenced environmental and socioeconomic conditions around the world. To assess these impacts and promote urban sustainability, a better understanding of urbanization patterns is needed. Recent studies have suggested several spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization, but their generality is yet to be adequately tested with long-term data. Thus, the main goal of our study was two-fold: (1) to examine the spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization of 16 world cities over a period of 200 years (1800–2000); and (2) to test four prominent hypotheses of urbanization patterns. Using a set of landscape metrics, we quantified temporal changes in the urban landscape pattern of the 16 cities and examined the four hypotheses individually. Our results show that these cities exhibit several common urbanization patterns: the urban landscape becomes compositionally more diverse, structurally more fragmented and geometrically more complex as urbanization progresses. Our study also suggests that urbanization is a process of shifting dominance among three urban growth modes: infilling, edge expanding and leapfrogging. However, idiosyncrasies do exist for individual cities, as detailed attributes of urbanization patterns often depend on the environmental and socioeconomic settings of cities. In addition, the choice of specific landscape metrics and the scales of analysis both influence the urbanization patterns revealed. Our study examined the urbanization patterns, for the first time, on long-term and global scales. The findings shed new light on the patterns and processes of urbanization, with implications for future studies of the ecology, planning and sustainability of cities.