Impacts of atmospheric pollution on the plant communities of British acid grasslands

Payne, Richard; Stevens, Carly J; Dise, Nancy B; Gowing, David J; Pilkington, Michael G; Phoenix, Gareth K; Emmett, Bridget A; Ashmore, Michael R; Biological and Environmental Sciences; Lancaster University; Manchester Metropolitan University; The Open University; University of Sheffield; University of Sheffield; Centre for Ecology & Hydrology; University of York

Impacts of atmospheric pollution on the plant communities of British acid grasslands

2013 | 2011

Air pollutants are recognised as important agents of ecosystem change but few studies consider the effects of multiple pollutants and their interactions. Here we use ordination, constrained cluster analysis and indicator value analyses to identify potential environmental controls on species composition, ecological groupings and indicator species in a gradient study of UK acid grasslands. The community composition of these grasslands is related to climate, grazing, ozone exposure and nitrogen deposition, with evidence for an interaction between the ecological impacts of base cation and nitrogen deposition. Ozone is a key agent in species compositional change but is not associated with a reduction in species richness or diversity indices, showing the subtly different drivers on these two aspects of ecosystem degradation. Our results demonstrate the effects of multiple interacting pollutants, which may collectively have a greater impact than any individual agent.

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AGROVOC Keywords

biodiversity ozone

Bibliographic information

Publisher

Elsevier

Other Subjects

Nitrogen deposition; Ordination; Critical loads; Base cation deposition

Language

English

Format

application/pdf

License

Published in Environmental Pollution by Elsevier; Elsevier believes that individual authors should be able to distribute their accepted author manuscripts for their personal voluntary needs and interests, e.g. posting to their websites or their institution’s repository, e-mailing to colleagues. The Elsevier Policy is as follows: Authors retain the right to use the accepted author manuscript for personal use, internal institutional use and for permitted scholarly posting provided that these are not for purposes of commercial use or systematic distribution. An "accepted author manuscript" is the author’s version of the manuscript of an article that has been accepted for publication and which may include any author-incorporated changes suggested through the processes of submission processing, peer review, and editor-author communications.

ISBN

0002954931000, 0-800523354

Type

Journal Article; Am - Accepted Manuscript

In AGRIS since: 2024-11-28

Format: Dublin Core

Data Provider

This bibliographic record has been provided by University of Stirling

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Links

DOI http://hdl.handle.net/1893/17249 http://dspace.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/17249/1/Payne%20et%20al%202011%20Environmental%20Pollution.pdf

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