Long-term responses of grassland ecosystems of experimental warming

It is an ecological certainty that global warming will affect almost all ecosystem processes. However, we still lack knowledge on long-term impacts of warming on feedback processes that operate on time scales of years, decades, and even millennia. We have been conducting a long-term experiment since 1999 to (1) evaluate consequences of phenological shifts on biomass production and timing of carbon and nitrogen processes; (2) long-term warming effects on soil respiration and ecosystem production; (3) changes in nitrogen transformation processes under warming; and (4) changes in the plant and microbial community structure under climate warming and clipping.