ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
High plant diversity and slow assembly of old-growth grasslands.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Encroachment diminishes herbaceous plant diversity in grassy ecosystems worldwide.Global change biology · 2022Pooled it
- Boosting multifunctionality through adaptive trait-based species addition in ongoing restoration projects.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2026Article
- Modifications in fire frequency impact belowground plant components in old-growth grasslands, posing risks to their resilience.American journal of botany · 2025Article
- Prairie management practices influence biodiversity, productivity and surface-atmosphere feedbacks.The New phytologist · 2025Article
- Landscape-scale predictions of future grassland conversion to cropland or development.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Putting seedlings on the map: Trade-offs in demographic rates between ontogenetic size classes in five tropical forests.Ecology · 2025Article
- Long-term, large-scale experiment reveals the effects of seed limitation, climate, and anthropogenic disturbance on restoration of plant communities in a biodiversity hotspot.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Foundation plant species provide resilience and microclimatic heterogeneity in drylands.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Review
- Bison outperform cattle at restoring their home on the range.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Six years of wild bee monitoring shows changes in biodiversity within and across years and declines in abundance.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Rural land abandonment is too ephemeral to provide major benefits for biodiversity and climate.Science advances · 2022Article
- Fire exclusion changes belowground bud bank and bud-bearing organ composition jeopardizing open savanna resilience.Oecologia · 2022Article
- Article
- Drivers and constraints of land use transitions on Western grasslands: insights from a California mountain ranching community.Landscape ecology · 2022Article
- Post-restoration grassland management overrides the effects of restoration methods in propagule-rich landscapes.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2022Article
- Convergent acoustic community structure in South Asian dry and wet grassland birds.Biology open · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Earth's ancient grasslands and savannas-hereafter old-growth grasslands-have long been viewed by scientists and environmental policymakers as early successional plant communities of low conservation value. Challenging this view, emerging research suggests that old-growth grasslands support substantial biodiversity and are slow to recover if destroyed by human land uses (e.g., tillage agriculture, plantation forestry). But despite growing interest in grassland conservation, there has been no global test of whether old-growth grasslands support greater plant species diversity than secondary grasslands (i.e., herbaceous communities that assemble after destruction of old-growth grasslands). Our synthesis of 31 studies, including 92 timepoints on six continents, found that secondary grasslands supported 37% fewer plant species than old-growth grasslands (log response ratio = -0.46) and that secondary grasslands typically require at least a century, and more often millennia (projected mean 1,400 y), to recover their former richness. Young (<29 y) secondary grasslands were composed of weedy species, and even as their richness increased over decades to centuries, secondary grasslands were still missing characteristic old-growth grassland species (e.g., long-lived perennials). In light of these results, the view that all grasslands are weedy communities, trapped by fire and large herbivores in a state of arrested succession, is untenable. Moving forward, we suggest that ecologists should explicitly consider grassland assembly time and endogenous disturbance regimes in studies of plant community structure and function. We encourage environmental policymakers to prioritize old-growth grassland conservation and work to elevate the status of old-growth grasslands, alongside old-growth forests, in the public consciousness.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.