ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2012
Legacies of precipitation fluctuations on primary production: theory and data synthesis.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 102 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
102 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 626 citations in OpenAlex.
- Increasing CONature · 2026Pooled it
- Drought conditions reorder plant communities through expansion of spatially sparse and temporally intermittent species.Ecology · 2026Article
- Nutrient Enrichment Increases Grassland Biomass Sensitivity to Interannual Precipitation Variation.Global change biology · 2026Article
- A Decade of Rainfall Manipulation Reveals Growing-Season Aridity as a Key Determinant of Grassland Productivity and Stability.Global change biology · 2026Article
- When the desert dries: rainfall drives conflicts and conservation challenges for onager (Journal of mammalogy · 2026Article
- Differential Effects of Soil Moisture and Air Temperature on Vegetation Dynamics in Northwest China's Warming and Wetting Region: An LSTM Modeling Approach.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Herbaceous plant communities respond more to seasonal precipitation than cumulative drought in the hot deserts of the United States.Plant biology (Stuttgart, Germany) · 2026Article
- Resistance of shallow soil carbon to both short-term isolated and recurrent droughts in two semi-arid grasslands.Oecologia · 2026Article
- Divergent responses of seed banks and aboveground vegetation to drought and deluge in grasslands across an elevational gradient.Oecologia · 2025Article
- Consistent timelines, divergent end points: plant community change in multiple tallgrass nitrogen addition experiments.Oecologia · 2025Article
- Long-term ecological studies must continue: insights from a dryland transition zone.Oecologia · 2025Article
- Large-scale surveys of woodrats (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The Effects of an Initial Extreme Drought and Chronic Change in Precipitation on Plant Biomass Allocation in a Temperate Grassland.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
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- Primary and secondary growth of Pinus halepensis are more sensitive to inter-annual drought variability than to 14 years of rainfall exclusion in a Mediterranean forest.Annals of botany · 2025Article
- Herbivores override climate control of grassland production in Yellowstone National Park.Ecology · 2025Article
- Interactions among nutrients govern the global grassland biomass-precipitation relationship.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Moisture legacy effects shape vegetation productivity across East Asia ecosystems, 2001-2020.Frontiers in plant science · 2025Article
- Widespread underestimation of rain-induced soil carbon emissions from global drylands.Nature geoscience · 2025Article
42 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Variability of above-ground net primary production (ANPP) of arid to sub-humid ecosystems displays a closer association with precipitation when considered across space (based on multiyear averages for different locations) than through time (based on year-to-year change at single locations). Here, we propose a theory of controls of ANPP based on four hypotheses about legacies of wet and dry years that explains space versus time differences in ANPP-precipitation relationships. We tested the hypotheses using 16 long-term series of ANPP. We found that legacies revealed by the association of current- versus previous-year conditions through the temporal series occur across all ecosystem types from deserts to mesic grasslands. Therefore, previous-year precipitation and ANPP control a significant fraction of current-year production. We developed unified models for the controls of ANPP through space and time. The relative importance of current-versus previous-year precipitation changes along a gradient of mean annual precipitation with the importance of current-year PPT decreasing, whereas the importance of previous-year PPT remains constant as mean annual precipitation increases. Finally, our results suggest that ANPP will respond to climate-change-driven alterations in water availability and, more importantly, that the magnitude of the response will increase with time.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.