Precipitation mediates the effects of species diversity and belowground ecosystem multifunctionality on community stability across alpine grasslands, Qinghai-Xizang Plateau

Abstract

Maintaining community stability has profound positive impacts on the ecological functions and sustainable utilization of grassland ecosystems. Numerous studies have explored how community stability responds to climate change and its relationship with plant species diversity. Nevertheless, the impact and underlying mechanisms of belowground ecosystem multifunctionality (BGEMF) on community stability along a precipitation gradient in alpine grasslands remain poorly understood. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted field surveys from 2015 to 2020, measuring plant species diversity, annual net primary productivity (ANPP), and soil physicochemical properties across 79 sites in alpine grassland ecosystems on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau. Our findings highlight both plant species diversity (standardized total effect: 32 %) and BGEMF (standardized total effect: 75 %) had an indirect effect on stability viaregulating mean ANPP within alpine grasslands. Furthermore, mean annual precipitation substantially impacted both plant species diversity and BGEMF, subsequently affecting community stability. However, temperature had a strong negative regulatory effect on species diversity, the mean and variability of ANPP. Thus, we emphasized the pivotal role of plant species diversity and BGEMF in shaping community stability, and stated the imperative need for species conservation and BGEMF improvement to sustain alpine ecosystems in the face of ongoing climate change.

Keywords

Species diversity / Climate change / Belowground ecosystem multifunctionality / Community stability / Qinghai-Xizang Plateau

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Miao Liu: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Validation, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing – review & editing. Le Sun: Writing – review & editing. Yanli Zhang: Writing – review & editing. Yuqing Liu: Writing – review & editing. Yang Li: Investigation. Ziyin Du: Writing – review & editing. Fei Peng: Writing – review & editing.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported financially by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 32271774).

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