Restoration in this era of climate change comes with a new challenge: anticipating how best to restore populations to persist under future climate conditions. Specifically, it remains unknown whether locally adapted or warm-adapted seeds best promote native plant community restoration in the warmer conditions predicted in the future and whether local or warm-adapted soil microbial communities could mitigate plant responses to warming. This may be especially relevant for biomes spanning large climatic gradients, such as the North American tallgrass prairie. Here, we used a short-term mesocosm experiment to evaluate how seed provenances (Local Northern region, Non-local Northern region, Non-local Southern region) of 10 native tallgrass prairie plants (four forbs, two legumes, and four grasses) responded to warmer conditions predicted in the future and how soil microbial communities from those three regions influenced these responses. Warming and seed provenance affected plant community composition and warming decreased plant diversity for all three seed provenances. Plant species varied in their individual responses to warming, and across species, we detected no consistent differences among the three provenances in terms of biomass response to warming and few strong effects of soil provenance. Our work provides evidence that warming, in part, may reduce plant diversity and affect restored prairie composition. Because the southern provenance did not consistently outperform others under warming and we found little support for the “local is best” paradigm currently dominating restoration practice, identifying appropriate seed provenances to promote restoration success both now and in future warmer environments may be challenging. Due to the idiosyncratic responses across species, we recommend that land managers compare seeds from different regions for each species to determine which seed provenance performs best under warming and in restoration for tallgrass prairies.

中文翻译：

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南方种子或土壤微生物能否减轻变暖对建立草原植物群落的影响？

在这个气候变化时代的恢复带来了新的挑战：预测如何最好地恢复人口以在未来的气候条件下持续存在。具体来说，在未来预测的温暖条件下，当地适应或温暖适应的种子是否最能促进本地植物群落的恢复，以及当地或温暖适应的土壤微生物群落是否可以减轻植物对变暖的反应，仍然未知。这可能与跨越大气候梯度的生物群落特别相关，例如北美高草草原。在这里，我们使用一个短期的中宇宙实验来评估 10 种原生高草草原植物（四种草本植物、两种豆科植物、和四种草）对未来预测的温暖条件作出反应，以及这三个地区的土壤微生物群落如何影响这些反应。变暖和种子来源影响植物群落组成，变暖降低了所有三种种子来源的植物多样性。植物物种对变暖的个体反应各不相同，并且在不同物种之间，我们发现三个来源之间在生物量对变暖的反应和土壤来源的强烈影响方面没有一致的差异。我们的工作提供的证据表明，变暖在一定程度上可能会减少植物多样性并影响恢复的草原组成。因为在气候变暖的情况下，南部原产地的表现并没有始终优于其他原产地，而且我们发现目前主导修复实践的“当地最好”范式几乎没有支持，确定适当的种子来源以促进现在和未来温暖环境中的恢复成功可能具有挑战性。由于物种间的特殊反应，我们建议土地管理者比较来自不同地区的每个物种的种子，以确定在变暖和恢复高草草原时哪个种子来源表现最好。