Is Plant Life-History of Biseasonal Germination Consistent in Response to Extreme Precipitation?

Future climate is projected to increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme precipitation events, and the resulting ecological consequences are often more serious than those of normal precipitation events. In particular, in desert ecosystems, due to the low frequency and strong fluctuation of extreme precipitation, the destructive consequences for desert plants caused by extreme precipitation have not received enough attention for some time. Based on statistics of extreme precipitation events (1965–2018) in the Gurbantunggut Desert, we investigated the effects of extreme precipitation (+0%, CK; +50%, W1; +100%, W2; +200%, W3; maintenance of field capacity, W4) on the plant life-history of the spring-germinated (SG) and autumn-germinated (AG) ephemeral plant Erodium oxyrhynchum by monitoring seedling emergence, survival, phenology, organ size, biomass accumulation, and allocation. The results showed that extreme precipitation caused about 2.5% seedling emergence of E. oxyrhynchum in autumn 2018 and 3.0% seedling emergence in early spring 2019, which means that most seeds may be stored in the soil or have died. Meanwhile, extreme precipitation significantly improved the survival, organ size, and biomass accumulation of SG and AG plants, and W3 was close to the precipitation threshold of SG (326.70 mm) and AG (560.10 mm) plants corresponding to the maximum individual biomass; thus, AG plants with a longer life cycle need more water for growth. Conversely, W4 caused AG plants to enter the leaf stage in advance and led to death in winter, which indicates that extreme precipitation may not be good for AG plants. Root and reproduction biomass allocation of SG and AG plants showed a significantly opposite trend under extreme precipitation treatments, which might be related to their different life-history strategies. Therefore, when only taking into account the changing trend of extreme precipitation from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) climate projections data, we speculate that extreme precipitation may promote the growth of SG and AG plants from the beginning to the middle of this century, but extreme precipitation in autumn exceeding a certain threshold may adversely affect the survival of AG plants at the end of the century.