Ecosystem multifunctionality and soil microbial communities in response to ecological restoration in an alpine degraded grassland

Frontiers in Plant Science

Plant Science

Xiangyang Shu¹  Wei Zhou¹  Yufu Hu¹  Yanyan Zhang¹  Yulin Zhang²  Longlong Xia³  Weijia Liu⁴  Kunkun Fan⁵ 

[1] College of Resources, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, China;Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China;Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research (IMK-IFU), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany;Institute of Agricultural Bioenvironment and Energy, Chengdu Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Chengdu, China;State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China;

关键词: ecological restoration;    multifunctionality;    biodiversity;    microbial stability;    alpine grassland;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpls.2023.1173962

 received in 2023-02-25, accepted in 2023-07-07,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Linkages between microbial communities and multiple ecosystem functions are context-dependent. However, the impacts of different restoration measures on microbial communities and ecosystem functioning remain unclear. Here, a 14-year long-term experiment was conducted using three restoration modes: planting mixed grasses (MG), planting shrub with Salix cupularis alone (SA), and planting shrub with Salix cupularis plus planting mixed grasses (SG), with an extremely degraded grassland serving as the control (CK). Our objective was to investigate how ecosystem multifunctionality and microbial communities (diversity, composition, and co-occurrence networks) respond to different restoration modes. Our results indicated that most of individual functions (i.e., soil nutrient contents, enzyme activities, and microbial biomass) in the SG treatment were significantly higher than in the CK treatment, and even higher than MG and SA treatments. Compared with the CK treatment, treatments MG, SA, and SG significantly increased the multifunctionality index on average by 0.57, 0.23 and 0.76, respectively. Random forest modeling showed that the alpha-diversity and composition of bacterial communities, rather than fungal communities, drove the ecosystem multifunctionality. Moreover, we found that both the MG and SG treatments significantly improved bacterial network stability, which exhabited stronger correlations with ecosystem multifunctionality compared to fungal network stability. In summary, this study demonstrates that planting shrub and grasses altogether is a promising restoration mode that can enhance ecosystem multifunctionality and improve microbial diversity and stability in the alpine degraded grassland.

【 授权许可】

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Copyright © 2023 Shu, Liu, Hu, Xia, Fan, Zhang, Zhang and Zhou