Host diversity positively affects the temporal stability of foliar fungal diseases in a Tibetan alpine meadow

Abstract

Background and aims: Plant disease can dramatically affect population dynamics, community composition and ecosystem functions. However, most empirical studies focus on diseases at a certain time point and largely ignore their temporal stability, which directly affects our ability to predict when and where disease outbreaks will occur.

Methods: Using a removal experiment that manipulates plant diversity (i.e. a plant biodiversity and ecosystem function experiment) and a fertilization experiment in a Tibetan alpine meadow, we investigated how different plant biodiversity indices and nitrogen fertilization affect the temporal stability of foliar fungal diseases (measured as the mean value of community pathogen load divided by its standard deviation) over seven consecutive years.

Key results: We found that the temporal stability of foliar fungal diseases increased with plant diversity indices in the plant biodiversity and ecosystem function experiment. Meanwhile, we observed a weakly positive relationship between host diversity and temporal stability in the fertilization experiment. However, the nitrogen treatment did not affect temporal stability, given that fertilization increased both the mean and standard deviation of pathogen load by roughly the same magnitude.

Conclusions: We conclude that host diversity regulates the temporal stability of pathogen load, but we note that this effect may be attenuated under rapid biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene.

Keywords: Biodiversity; Tibetan Plateau; diversity–disease relationship; evenness; plant disease; standard deviation; time scale.