A soil disturbance has reportedly reduced the resilience of rangelands to climate change.

Researchers from the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment investigated how soil disturbance impacts American plants, according to a Sept. 12 Agricultural Research Service news release. The findings showed the importance of taking disturbance and subsequent plant invasion into account when calculating how climate change may change these ecosystems.

"We know that disturbing rangeland causes various problems, including plant invasion and loss of plant diversity. What this new study demonstrates is that rising carbon dioxide makes it more difficult to recover from that type of change," USDA research scientist Dana Blumenthal said in the release. 

Climate change is changing the rangelands, the grasslands on which humans rely for raising livestock, maintaining biological variety and many other ecosystem functions, according to the release. The impact of surging carbon dioxide and rising temperatures has been contemplated by academics, although the focus has usually been on intact or comparatively undisturbed ecosystems.

"We saw that these disturbances, combined with plant invasion, greatly reduce the resilience of mixed-grass prairie to climate change," Blumenthal said, according to the release. "That tells us that disturbance is a key factor that should be accounted for when predicting effects of future climatic conditions in these ecosystems"