AI Article Synopsis

  • Understanding microbial processes in alpine meadow soils is crucial for environmental sustainability and local land management, yet their role in soil multifunctionality during disturbances is not well researched.
  • Research on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau showed that degraded meadows had lower soil functions due to poorer soil conditions, and while microbial abundance changed little, bacterial network complexity significantly decreased.
  • Restoration efforts using single species of grass did not improve soil multifunctionality and instead destabilized bacterial networks, emphasizing that a diverse plant community is essential for effective ecosystem restoration.

Article Abstract

Understanding how microbial processes develop and change in alpine meadow soils is key to global initiatives toward environmental sustainability and local land management. Yet, how microbial interactions mediate soil multifunctionality in disturbed and managed alpine meadows remains understudied. Here, we investigated multiple community metrics, particularly microbial network properties and assembly processes, of soil bacterial and fungal communities and their links to certain soil functions along a degradation-restoration sequence of alpine meadows in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. Meadow degradation caused significant declines in soil hydraulic conductivity (e.g., higher bulk density, reduced soil porosity and water content) and nitrogen availability, leading to lowered soil multifunctionality. Meadow degradation only caused weak changes in microbial abundance, alpha diversity, and community composition, but remarkably reduced bacterial network complexity, to a less extent for fungal network properties. Short-term artificial restoration with productive grass monocultures did not restore soil multifunctionality, in turn even destabilized bacterial network and favored pathogenic over mutualistic fungi. Soil fungi community are more stable than bacteria in disturbed alpine meadows, and they evolved with distinct assembly strategies (stochastic-dominant versus deterministic-driven processes, respectively). Further, microbial network complexity, positively and better predicts soil multifunctionality than alpha diversity. Our work shows how microbial interaction complexity may enhance soil multifunctionality in degraded alpine meadow ecosystems, noting that meadow restoration with low plant species diversity may failed in restoring multiple ecosystem functions. These findings would help predict the outcomes of global environmental changes and inform management strategies in regional grassland conservation and restoration.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.118182DOI Listing

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