Abstract
The community stability is the main ability to resist and be resilient to climate changes. In a world of climate warming and melting glaciers, alpine gravel encroachment was occurring universally and threatening hillside grassland ecosystem. Gravel encroachment caused by climate warming and glacial melting may alter community structure and community stability in alpine meadow. Yet, the effects of climate warming-induced gravel encroachment on grassland communities are unknown. Here, a 1-year short-term field experiment was conducted to explore the early stage drive process of gravel encroachment on community structure and stability at four different gravel encroachment levels 0%, 30%, 60%, and 90% gravel coverage at an alpine meadow on the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau, by analyzing the changes of dominant species stability and species asynchrony to the simulated gravel encroachment processes. Gravel encroachment rapidly changed the species composition and species ranking of alpine meadow plant community in a short period of time. Specifically, community stability of alpine meadow decreased by 61.78–79.48%, which may be due to the reduced dominant species stability and species asynchrony. Species asynchrony and dominant species stability were reduced by 2.65–17.39% and 46.51–67.97%, respectively. The results of this study demonstrate that gravel encroachment presents a severe negative impact on community structure and stability of alpine meadow in the short term, the longer term and comprehensive study should be conducted to accurate prediction of global warming-induced indirect effects on alpine grassland ecosystems.
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We thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on this manuscript, and thank work team members for their contributions to the assistance with field work and data collection.
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This research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC32230068), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB40000000), and Natural Science Foundation of Qinghai Province (2020-ZJ-726).
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GLW conceived the idea and designed the study; HF, ZC, and JZ collected the data and analyzed the data; JZ and GLW wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed critically to the draft and gave final approval for publication.
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Wu, GL., Fang, H., Cui, Z. et al. Warming-driven indirect effects on alpine grasslands: short-term gravel encroachment rapidly reshapes community structure and reduces community stability. Oecologia 202, 251–259 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05393-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05393-y