Climate change is one of the largest threats to grassland plant species, which can be modified by land management. Although climate change and land management are expected to separately and interactively influence plant demography, this has been rarely considered in climate change experiments. We used a large‐scale experiment in central Germany to quantify the effects of grassland management, climate change, and their joint effect on the demography and population growth rate of 11 plant species all native to this temperate grassland ecosystem. We parameterized integral projection models with five years of demographic data to project population growth rate. We hypothesized that plant populations perform better in the ambient than in the future climate treatment that creates hotter and drier summer conditions. Further, we hypothesized that plant performance interactively responds to climate and land management in a species‐specific manner based on the drought, mowing, and grazing tolerances as well as the flowering phenology of each species. Due to extreme drought events, over half of our study species went quasi extinct, which highlights how extreme climate events can influence long‐term experimental results. We found no consistent support for our expectation that plants perform better in ambient compared with future climate conditions. However, several species showed interactive responses to the treatments, indicating that optimal management strategies for plant performance are expected to shift with climate change. Changes in population growth rates of these species across treatments were mostly due to changes in plant reproduction. Experiments combined with measuring plant demographic responses provide a way to isolate the effects of different drivers on the long‐term persistence of species and to identify the demographic vital rates that are critical to manage in the future. Our study suggests that it will become increasingly difficult to maintain species with preferences for moister soil conditions, and that climate and land use can interactively alter demographic responses of the remaining grassland species.

中文翻译：

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繁殖变化介导气候变化和草原管理对植物种群动态的影响


气候变化是草原植物物种面临的最大威胁之一，可以通过土地管理来改变。尽管预计气候变化和土地管理会单独和交互地影响植物种群，但在气候变化实验中很少考虑这一点。我们在德国中部进行了一项大规模实验，量化了草原管理、气候变化及其对 11 种植物物种的人口和种群增长率的共同影响，这些植物物种都原产于这个温带草原生态系统。我们使用五年的人口统计数据参数化了整体投影模型，以预测人口增长率。我们假设植物种群在环境中的表现优于未来气候处理，后者会造成更热和更干燥的夏季条件。此外，我们假设植物性能基于每个物种的干旱、割草和放牧耐受性以及开花物候，以物种特异性的方式交互响应气候和土地管理。由于极端干旱事件，我们研究的物种中有一半以上接近灭绝，这凸显了极端气候事件如何影响长期实验结果。我们发现，与未来的气候条件相比，植物在环境中表现更好的预期没有一致的支持。然而，一些物种对处理表现出交互反应，这表明植物性能的最佳管理策略预计将随着气候变化而改变。这些物种在不同处理中种群增长率的变化主要是由于植物繁殖的变化。 实验与测量植物种群反应相结合，提供了一种分离不同驱动因素对物种长期持久性的影响的方法，并确定对未来管理至关重要的种群生命率。我们的研究表明，维持偏好潮湿土壤条件的物种将变得越来越困难，并且气候和土地利用可以交互地改变剩余草原物种的种群反应。