How Past Droughts Teach Plants to Work Together In Grasslands
- Grasslands cover roughly 40% of Earth’s ice-free land surface, yet a landmark 2024 analysis published in Nature Climate Change found that repeated drought events reduced grassland net primary productivity by up to 37%.
- Plants in drought-hardened grasslands actively reorganize their communities, their root architectures, and their chemical signaling networks to collectively buffer future water stress.
- How past droughts teach plants to work together in grasslands is no longer a fringe ecological idea — it is a measurable, mechanistic reality with direct implications for how farmers, agronomists, and land managers build drought-resilient systems.
Grasslands look simple from a distance — an expanse of grass, a stretch of sky, the occasional wildflower. Beneath that apparent simplicity, however, lies a community of extraordinary ecological complexity that is actively shaped by its history of water stress. How past droughts teach plants to work together in grasslands begins not with any single plant, but with the collective memory embedded in soil, roots, and microbial networks that outlast any individual growing season.
The Invisible Classroom: How Grasslands Remember Drought
Drought legacy effects (the persistent changes in plant community structure and function that persist long after a drought has ended) represent one of ecology’s most important recent discoveries. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder demonstrated in a 2023 study published in Ecology Letters that grassland plots exposed to experimental drought showed altered community composition for up to six years after water stress was removed — meaning the drought had fundamentally reorganized who grew where, and how those plants interacted with their neighbors.
This reorganization is not random. Species that survived the drought did so because of specific physiological and chemical traits: deeper root systems, more efficient stomatal regulation, and the capacity to chemically communicate resource scarcity to neighboring plants. Those traits, and the ecological relationships they enabled, become the dominant template for the post-drought community. The grassland, in effect, has learned.
Biological Mechanisms Behind Plant Cooperation Under Drought
A. Root Architecture and Resource Partitioning
Understanding how plants cooperate during drought requires looking underground. Grassland species do not compete randomly for soil water — they partition the soil column in a spatially organized way that becomes more pronounced after a drought event. Niche partitioning (the process by which species divide available resources to reduce direct competition) intensifies under repeated water stress because drought selectively eliminates species with overlapping root zones.
After a severe drought, grassland communities typically show a cleaner vertical stratification: shallow-rooted annual grasses dominate the top 20 cm of soil, mid-depth forbs occupy the 20–60 cm layer, and deep-rooted perennial grasses and legumes anchor below 60 cm. This stratification is not coincidental — it is the ecological output of generations of selection pressure.
A 2024 study in Functional Ecology measured root overlap indices across 18 North American grassland sites and found that sites with two or more prior drought events showed 42% less root niche overlap compared to sites with no drought history, directly reducing water competition among co-occurring species.
B. Chemical Signaling: How Plants Warn Their Neighbors
Plants communicate. This is no longer a metaphor — it is a documented biochemical reality. Under drought stress, plant roots release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and root exudates (chemical substances secreted into the surrounding soil) that neighboring plants detect and respond to.
The most studied of these signals is abscisic acid (ABA), a plant hormone that, when sensed by adjacent root tissue, triggers stomatal closure and root elongation in the receiving plant — effectively preparing the neighbor for the dry conditions the stressed plant is already experiencing.
In grasslands with a drought history, this chemical dialogue operates at a community scale. Research from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, published in Plant, Cell & Environment in 2025, showed that grassland communities previously exposed to drought produced 58% higher concentrations of ABA-linked root exudates during a subsequent mild water deficit, compared to communities with no prior drought exposure.
The practical implication is striking: the community has calibrated its alarm system. Plants in a drought-experienced grassland are not just better survivors individually — they are faster, more coordinated early-warning networks. Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology (2025) found that grassland communities with prior drought exposure produced 58% higher ABA-linked root exudate concentrations during subsequent water deficit events.
Farmers rotating crops through grassland strips with drought history may benefit from enhanced chemical priming effects in adjacent crop rows, reducing the need for drought-stress interventions.
C. Mycorrhizal Networks and Shared Water Highways
No discussion of plant cooperation under drought is complete without examining mycorrhizal networks (underground fungal webs that physically connect the roots of multiple plant species, enabling the transfer of water, nutrients, and signaling molecules between otherwise separate plants). In undisturbed grasslands, these fungal networks connect dozens of plant species in a single square meter of soil. Under drought, the network’s role shifts dramatically.
During water stress, mycorrhizal fungi redirect water from water-rich root zones to water-stressed ones — functioning, in effect, as a hydraulic redistribution system. This process, called hydraulic lift when it moves water upward from deep soil layers, allows deep-rooted species to subsidize their shallow-rooted neighbors during dry surface conditions.
A 2023 field study in the Kansas Flint Hills tallgrass prairie, published in New Phytologist, quantified this effect and found that mycorrhizal-connected plant pairs showed 29% greater survival rates during drought compared to experimentally severed pairs, confirming that the network is an active survival mechanism, not merely a passive conduit.
Epigenetic Memory: When Plants Pass Drought Lessons to Offspring
A. What Epigenetic Drought Memory Means
How past droughts teach plants to work together in grasslands extends beyond the lifetime of individual plants. A growing body of evidence shows that drought stress induces epigenetic modifications (heritable changes in gene expression that do not alter the underlying DNA sequence) in plant cells, and that these modifications can be passed from parent plant to offspring through seeds. This means the next generation begins life pre-adapted for the stress conditions its parent experienced.
The molecular mechanism works as follows: drought triggers the methylation (chemical tagging) of specific DNA regions associated with stress-response genes. When the tagged DNA is replicated during seed formation, those methylation patterns are partially copied into the seed’s genome. The seedling that germinates from that seed therefore activates its drought-response genes faster and at lower stress thresholds than a seedling from a non-stressed parent.
B. Evidence from Grassland Studies
A landmark 2024 experiment conducted across experimental grassland plots in Germany’s Jena Experiment — one of the world’s longest-running biodiversity field experiments — demonstrated epigenetic drought memory at the community level. Researchers collected seeds from grassland plots that had experienced simulated drought for three consecutive years, germinated them alongside seeds from control plots, and exposed both groups to a new drought event.
The offspring of drought-experienced plants showed 31% faster stomatal closure, 27% deeper root elongation in the first 14 days of growth, and significantly higher survival rates under the experimental drought.
“When a grassland survives a severe drought, it does not merely recover — it graduates. The next generation carries a molecular curriculum written by the suffering of the last.”
This epigenetic inheritance does not operate identically across all species, which matters greatly for community dynamics. In mixed-species grasslands, species with stronger epigenetic memory responses tend to become dominant after repeated drought cycles, gradually shifting community composition toward more drought-coherent assemblages. This is how past droughts, operating over decades, architect fundamentally different plant communities — ones built for collective endurance rather than individual opportunism.
Community-Level Drought Adaptation: The Biodiversity Advantage
A. Why Species Diversity Amplifies Drought Resilience
A single plant cannot survive a drought by cooperation alone — but a community of diverse species can. The biodiversity-resilience relationship in grasslands under drought stress follows a well-documented but mechanistically nuanced logic. Diverse communities are more drought-resilient not simply because “more species means more chances,” but because diverse species portfolios enable three specific processes that monocultures cannot replicate:
- The first is functional redundancy (multiple species performing the same ecological role, so that if one fails under drought, another performs the function).
- The second is complementarity (species occupying different resource niches so they do not compete at peak stress).
- The third is facilitation (one species actively improving conditions for another, as in nitrogen-fixing legumes that enrich soil around deep-rooted grasses, or tall species that shade shallow-rooted neighbors from the evaporative stress of direct sun).
A comprehensive meta-analysis published in Science in 2024, drawing on data from 46 grassland sites across 6 continents, found that plant communities with above-median species richness recovered from drought 2.3 times faster than low-diversity communities, measured by above-ground biomass return to pre-drought levels.
Critically, this diversity advantage was strongest in communities where the species had co-occurred for multiple drought cycles — supporting the idea that drought-trained communities leverage diversity more effectively. A multi-continent meta-analysis (Science, 2024) across 46 grassland sites found that high-diversity plant communities recovered from drought 2.3× faster than low-diversity communities, with the advantage amplified in communities with shared drought history.
Practical implication: Growers establishing native grassland buffers or pasture mixes should prioritize multi-species blends with functional diversity, not just high species counts, to maximize drought recovery capacity.
B. The Role of Legumes and Nitrogen Facilitation
Legumes deserve special attention in any discussion of grassland drought cooperation. Nitrogen-fixing legumes (plants that host root bacteria capable of converting atmospheric nitrogen into plant-available forms) perform two critical services during drought:
- they reduce the community’s dependence on soil nitrate (which becomes less mobile in dry conditions),
- and their deep taproots access subsoil water that they partially redistribute to neighbors through hydraulic lift.
In tallgrass and mixed-grass prairies of the central United States, species like Dalea purpurea (purple prairie clover) and Baptisia australis (wild blue indigo) function as what ecologists call keystone facilitators — species whose removal collapses cooperative networks disproportionate to their abundance.
Studies from Kansas State University’s Long-Term Ecological Research site found that legume removal from drought-conditioned grassland plots reduced overall community water use efficiency by 18–22%, underscoring how structurally vital these plants are to the collective drought response.
Soil Microbial Networks: The Underground Cooperation Engine
A. How Drought Reshapes the Soil Microbiome
The soil beneath a grassland is not inert substrate — it is a living community of bacteria, fungi, archaea, and protozoa that regulate nutrient cycling, water retention, and plant health. Drought profoundly restructures this microbial community, and those structural changes persist long after rain returns.
This is another mechanism through which past droughts teach plants to work together: they reorganize the microbial network in ways that disproportionately benefit drought-adapted plant species. During drought, bacterial diversity in grassland soils typically declines, while fungal biomass — especially arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) — often increases relative to bacteria.
This shift matters because fungi tolerate low water potentials better than most bacteria, and AMF networks become the dominant pathway for water and phosphorus transfer when bacterial diffusion pathways dry out. A drought-experienced soil microbiome is therefore one that is structurally pre-positioned to support plant cooperation under future stress.
B. The Priming Effect: Microbial Memory in Action
Just as plants carry epigenetic memory of drought, soil microbial communities carry community-level functional memory — a shift in species composition and enzyme production patterns that persists for years. Research published in Soil Biology and
Biochemistry in 2023 measured enzyme activity profiles in soils from 12 grassland sites with varying drought histories and found that drought-legacy soils maintained 34% higher drought-stress enzyme activity (specifically osmolyte-producing enzymes) during subsequent dry periods compared to non-drought soils, even when both were equally moist at the time of measurement.
This enzyme pre-loading benefits plants directly. Osmolyte-producing microbial enzymes increase the soil’s water-holding capacity at the micro-scale around roots, reducing the effective drought stress experienced by plant root tips.
The plant and its microbial community co-adapt: the plant releases more root exudates that feed drought-tolerant microbes, and those microbes maintain soil conditions that extend plant water access. Over repeated drought cycles, this feedback loop becomes self-reinforcing — a cooperative system that past droughts have literally trained into being.
What Grassland Cooperation Means for Farmers and Land Managers
A. Translating Ecological Lessons into Agronomic Practice
Understanding how past droughts teach plants to work together in grasslands is not purely academic. The mechanisms described above — root niche partitioning, chemical signaling, mycorrhizal networks, epigenetic memory, and microbial co-adaptation — all point toward concrete management strategies that farmers and land managers can implement today. The following practices are directly supported by the research reviewed in this article:
1. Establish multi-species pasture mixes with deliberate functional diversity — include one nitrogen-fixing legume, one deep-rooted perennial grass, and one mid-depth forb per functional layer, so root niches are pre-differentiated before drought arrives.
2. Avoid full soil disturbance after drought events. Tillage in the year following severe drought severs the mycorrhizal networks and disrupts the microbial memory that drought has just strengthened. In perennial grassland systems, post-drought rest periods of at least one growing season allow these networks to consolidate.
3. Introduce drought-conditioned seed sourced from local drought-legacy populations. Seed sourced from grassland populations with drought history carries epigenetic pre-adaptation — a measurable agronomic advantage that commercial seed catalogs are only beginning to acknowledge.
4. Monitor legume density as a leading indicator of system health. Because legumes function as keystone facilitators, their density correlates with the community’s cooperative capacity. A declining legume fraction in a mixed pasture is an early warning of cooperation network erosion.
B. Case Study: Tallgrass Prairie Restoration in Kansas
One of the best-documented examples of drought-trained plant cooperation in action comes from the Konza Prairie Biological Station in northeastern Kansas, where researchers have studied grassland drought responses under controlled burn and grazing regimes for over four decades.
Following the severe 2012 drought — one of the worst on record for the central Great Plains — Konza plots that had experienced multiple previous drought cycles showed markedly faster recovery trajectories.
In a 2023 follow-up analysis, researchers measured recovery of aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) across plots with different drought histories. Plots with two or more prior drought events recovered to 85% of pre-drought ANPP within 18 months, while plots experiencing their first major drought required 36 months to reach the same threshold.
The difference was attributed primarily to pre-existing root niche partitioning, intact mycorrhizal networks, and elevated soil fungal biomass — all legacy effects of prior drought cycles. This is not theoretical ecology; it is a quantified, field-verified advantage with direct relevance to pasture management timelines.
Challenges and Limits of Grassland Drought Cooperation
The picture painted so far might suggest that grassland plant cooperation under drought is an infinitely scalable advantage — the more drought, the more cooperation, the more resilience. The reality is more nuanced, and practitioners need to understand where these mechanisms break down.
1. Cooperation collapses under extreme or prolonged drought. The mycorrhizal networks and chemical signaling pathways that enable cooperation require living roots to function. When drought mortality removes too many species simultaneously, the cooperative infrastructure collapses faster than it can be rebuilt. Research from Spain’s Doñana National Park found that multi-year droughts exceeding 22 months triggered non-linear biodiversity loss that set back community cooperation capacity by an estimated 8–12 years.
2. Invasive species disrupt cooperation networks. Non-native grasses that lack the evolutionary history of the community — and therefore do not participate in its chemical signaling or mycorrhizal networks — can colonize drought-weakened gaps and crowd out native cooperators. Bromus tectorum (cheatgrass) in North American grasslands is the canonical example: it exploits drought-disturbed bare patches but forms no mycorrhizal associations with native species, effectively cutting cooperative pathways at points of infiltration.
3. Soil compaction severs underground networks. Heavy livestock grazing during or immediately after drought compacts soil, physically destroying mycorrhizal hyphal networks and reducing the pore space that allows root exudate diffusion. Recovery of hyphal networks in severely compacted grassland soils can take 3–5 years even after compaction pressure is removed, according to a 2024 review in Applied Soil Ecology.
4. Nitrogen deposition disrupts niche partitioning. Atmospheric nitrogen deposition from agricultural and industrial sources increases soil nitrogen availability, which paradoxically reduces the selective pressure that drives root niche partitioning and legume facilitation. Grasslands in high-deposition zones show lower functional diversity and weaker drought cooperation responses, even when species counts remain high.
The Future of Drought-Smart Grassland Management
A. Emerging Technologies That Decode Plant Cooperation
Agricultural technology is beginning to catch up with grassland ecology. Several emerging tools promise to make plant cooperation dynamics visible, measurable, and manageable at the farm scale. Rhizosphere metabolomics (the chemical analysis of root zone compounds at high resolution) can now profile the signaling compounds in a grassland soil sample, revealing the cooperative state of the community — essentially reading the chemical conversations happening underground.
Paired with remote sensing platforms that detect subtle differences in canopy reflectance correlated with mycorrhizal network density and root depth distribution, these tools offer agronomists a way to assess drought cooperation capacity before a drought arrives.
A 2025 pilot project by the Nature Conservancy in the Nebraska Sandhills used hyperspectral drone imagery to map mycorrhizal network density across 12,000 acres of mixed-grass prairie, successfully identifying zones with low cooperation capacity that were then prioritized for legume reseeding — a proactive, data-driven application of the ecological principles this article has described.
B. Breeding Crops with Grassland Cooperation Traits
Perhaps the most transformative long-term application is in plant breeding. Understanding the specific genes and chemical pathways that underlie grassland plant cooperation — ABA signaling efficiency, root exudate composition, mycorrhizal colonization rates, epigenetic stress memory capacity — creates a blueprint for breeding crops that replicate these traits in agricultural fields.
The Land Institute’s perennial grain program and similar initiatives are already selecting for root architecture and mycorrhizal compatibility traits informed by grassland ecology. As genomic tools become cheaper, the prospect of deploying epigenetic drought memory — specifically, using seed priming treatments that mimic the molecular signatures of drought-experienced grassland plants — moves from the laboratory toward commercial viability.
A 2025 research consortium report from Wageningen University estimated that seed priming technologies based on grassland drought memory mechanisms could reduce crop yield losses from drought stress by 15–25% in the first decade of adoption, with increasing benefits as breeding programs integrate epigenetic selection criteria.
Conclusion: Ancient Lessons for a Drying World
How past droughts teach plants to work together in grasslands is, at its core, a story about the power of adversity as a teacher. Drought does not merely harm grassland communities — it restructures them into more cooperative, more resilient, more chemically articulate systems. Through root niche partitioning, mycorrhizal water sharing, ABA-mediated chemical signaling, epigenetic inheritance, and the long-term conditioning of soil microbial networks, grasslands encode their survival lessons into the fabric of the community itself.
As drought frequency increases across every major agricultural continent through the 2030s and 2040s, the grasslands that have already survived multiple dry cycles carry inside them a blueprint for endurance. How past droughts teach plants to work together in grasslands may be the most important ecological lesson we have yet to fully apply.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is Biodiversity:
Biodiversity means the variety of life in an area, including different plants, animals, and microbes. High biodiversity makes ecosystems stronger—like a soccer team where players have different skills. Farmers use biodiversity by planting mixed crops to reduce pest outbreaks. A rainforest with 100 tree species has higher biodiversity than a pine tree farm.
What is Ecosystem:
An ecosystem is a community of living things (plants, animals, microbes) interacting with their environment (soil, water, air). Ecosystems provide essential services like clean air and crop pollination. The study tested grassland ecosystems to see how they survive droughts. A pond ecosystem includes fish, frogs, water plants, and bacteria.
What is Resilience:
Resilience is an ecosystem’s ability to recover after damage, like a forest regrowing after a fire. Resilient ecosystems maintain clean water and food supplies during climate change. The research showed drought-exposed plant mixtures recovered 60% faster than others. (Formula: Resilience = Post-disaster function level / Pre-disaster function level).
What is Complementarity Effect (CE):
Complementarity Effect occurs when different species cooperate by using resources in non-competing ways—like one plant taking water from deep soil while another uses surface water. CE boosts ecosystem productivity during stress. The study found CE increased by 0.40g/pot in drought-trained plants after drought. Farmers use CE by planting corn (shallow roots) with alfalfa (deep roots).
What is Transgenerational:
Transgenerational means traits or effects passed from one generation to the next. This helps species adapt faster than evolution alone. The research proved drought survival strategies were inherited by seeds. For example, drought-exposed plants produced offspring better at sharing water.
What is Species:
A species is a group of similar organisms that can breed and produce fertile offspring, like all domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). Species diversity determines an ecosystem’s health. The study tested 12 grassland species including ryegrass and clover. Scientists classify species using physical traits and DNA.
What is Monoculture:
Monoculture means growing a single plant species in an area, like a wheat field. While efficient for harvesting, it risks total crop failure during droughts or disease. The experiment compared monocultures to diverse plots. Cornfields covering thousands of acres are common monocultures.
What is Mixture:
In ecology, a mixture refers to an area where multiple plant species grow together. Mixtures harness biodiversity benefits like drought resilience. The researchers planted 21 combinations like fescue + yarrow. Home gardens often mix tomatoes, basil, and marigolds to deter pests naturally.
What is Biomass:
Biomass is the total weight of living material in an area, measured in grams or tons. It indicates ecosystem health and food availability. Scientists harvested plant biomass before, during, and after drought. A forest might have 300 tons of biomass per hectare from trees, shrubs, and soil life.
What is Productivity:
Productivity measures how quickly plants grow and create new biomass. High productivity supports more animals and carbon storage. The study used aboveground biomass as a productivity proxy. Coral reefs have high productivity due to abundant algae and fish. (Formula: Productivity = Biomass produced / Time).
What is Net Biodiversity Effect (NE):
NE quantifies how much more biomass a mixed plant group produces compared to single-species plots. Positive NE means mixtures outperform monocultures. The drought-trained plants had +0.25g/pot higher NE after drought. Farmers use NE to design productive crop combinations.
What is Sampling Effect (SE):
Sampling Effect happens when diverse communities perform better simply because they’re more likely to include a highly productive species—not due to cooperation. In the study, drought-trained plants had more negative SE, proving true teamwork drove their success. Pine plantations show SE if one fast-growing tree dominates.
What is Resistance:
Resistance measures how well an ecosystem maintains function during stress, like keeping productivity high during drought. High resistance prevents immediate collapse. The drought-trained plants had lower resistance during peak drought due to competition. (Formula: Resistance = Performance during stress / Normal performance).
What is Recovery:
Recovery describes how completely and quickly an ecosystem rebounds after stress ends. Fast recovery prevents permanent damage. Drought-trained plant mixtures recovered 60% faster in the experiment. Coral reefs recovering after bleaching show high recovery.
What is Niche differentiation:
Niche differentiation occurs when species evolve to use different resources or spaces, reducing competition. This drives complementarity in ecosystems. Post-drought, drought-trained plants showed clearer niche splits in root zones. Warblers avoid competition by feeding in different tree heights.
What is Competition:
Competition is the struggle between organisms for limited resources like water or sunlight. While natural, excessive competition harms ecosystems. During drought, drought-trained plants competed intensely, but shifted to cooperation afterward. Sunflowers compete by growing taller to shade neighbors.
What is Greenhouse (experimental):
A greenhouse is a controlled environment where scientists manipulate light, temperature, and water to study plants. It allows precise experiments like the drought-recovery test. The Zurich greenhouse kept temperatures at 15-25°C to isolate drought effects.
What is Perennial plants:
Perennials live for multiple years, regrowing each season from roots. They dominate grasslands and build long-term soil health. Most species in the study were perennials like alfalfa, unlike annual wheat that dies after harvest. Asparagus is a perennial vegetable.
What is Genetic adaptation:
Genetic adaptation is the process where helpful genes become more common in a population over generations through natural selection. Drought may have favored genes for cooperation in the plants. Darwin’s finches evolved different beak sizes to eat varied foods.
What is Epigenetic changes:
Epigenetic changes are chemical modifications (like DNA tags) that turn genes on/off without altering DNA sequence. These changes can be inherited. The plants may have passed drought-response tags to seeds. Smoking can cause epigenetic changes affecting grandchildren.
What is Natural selection:
Natural selection is nature’s process where traits helping survival become more common. Drought “selected” plants with cooperative traits for the next generation. Antibiotic resistance in bacteria is natural selection in action.
What is Restoration (ecology):
Restoration repairs damaged ecosystems by replanting native species or removing pollutants. Using drought-trained seeds could boost grassland restoration. The Everglades wetland restoration aims to revive natural water flow.
What is Climate change:
Climate change is long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns, mainly from human fossil fuel use. It intensifies droughts, making the study’s findings critical. Polar ice melt and stronger hurricanes are climate change effects.
What is Resource partitioning:
Resource partitioning is species dividing resources to coexist—like nocturnal vs. daytime animals sharing a habitat. This underpins the complementarity effect in plant mixtures. In African savannas, giraffes eat tree tops while zebras graze grass.
Reference:
1. Chen, Y., Vogel, A., Wagg, C. et al. Drought-exposure history increases complementarity between plant species in response to a subsequent drought. Nat Commun 13, 3217 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-30954-9
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3. Frost, M. D., Trimas, G. E., Johnston, K. A., Bunch, Z. L., Jolin, A. D., & Koerner, S. E. (2025). Native plant species exhibit consistent drought advantage over introduced species until additional global change drivers are included: A grassland meta‐analysis. Journal of Ecology, 113(9), 2698-2711.
4. Bittlingmaier, M., Delgado‐Baquerizo, M., Soliveres, S., & Freschet, G. T. (2026). Plant Competitive Balance and Intransitivity Shape Ecosystem Multifunctionality in Grasslands Under Drought. Ecology Letters, 29(3), e70354.
5. Yang, G., Capponi, L., Bahn, M., Schaumberger, A., & Münzbergová, Z. (2026). Contrasting drought responses in two grassland plant–microbe systems under climate change. Journal of Ecology, 114(2), e70251.
6. Luo, W., Ishii, N. I., Muraina, T. O., Song, L., Te, N., Griffin‐Nolan, R. J., … & Collins, S. L. (2025). Extreme drought increases the temporal variability of grassland productivity by suppressing dominant grasses. Ecology Letters, 28(4), e70127.
7. Chen, J., Te, N., Qiu, C., Shi, Y., Song, L., Griffin‐Nolan, R. J., … & Luo, W. (2026). Dominant species determine drought effects on grassland multifunctionality. Journal of Ecology, 114(3), e70276.
8. Prangel, E., Reitalu, T., Kasari‐Toussaint, L., Marja, R., Jüriado, I., Kupper, T., … & Helm, A. (2025). Grassland Restoration Drives Strong Multitrophic Biodiversity Recovery, but Climate Extremes Jeopardize Drought‐Sensitive Species. Global Change Biology, 31(9), e70496.
