Abstract
On-going climate warming is threatening the ecological function of grassland ecosystems. However, whether warming has positive effects on community microhabitats and appearance, especially in degraded grasslands, remains elusive. To address this issue, we conducted a 2-year field experiment on the severely degraded alpine meadow and undegraded alpine meadow with no warming and warming treatments. Community coverage and height in degraded meadow significantly increased under warming, while these changes were not significant in undegraded meadow. Two-year warming increased the community height of degraded meadow and undegraded meadow by 56.55% and 10.99%, respectively. Warming also increased community coverage by 41.88% in degraded meadow and decreased community coverage by 3.01% in undegraded meadow. Moreover, the response of topsoil temperature to warming was stronger in degraded meadow (6.89%) than in undegraded meadow (− 0.26%), while the negative response of topsoil moisture to warming was weaker in degraded meadow (− 13.95%) than in undegraded meadow (− 20.00%). The SEMs further demonstrated that warming had positive effects on topsoil temperature and community height, while had negative effects on topsoil moisture both in degraded and undegraded meadows. Our results confirm that warming-induced soil drying is an important pathway affecting the community appearance in alpine meadows. These findings highlight that warming has positive effects on community height and coverage and is particularly effective in improving community coverage appearance in severely degraded alpine meadow with topsoil drying.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on this manuscript, and thank team members for their work in the field experiment.
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This study was funded by projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 32230068) and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB40000000).
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GLW conceived the idea and designed the study; GLW collected the data and analyzed the data; GLW and JXZ wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed critically to the draft and gave final approval for publication.
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Communicated by Melinda D. Smith.
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Wu, GL., Zhao, J. Warming positively promoted community appearance restoration of the degraded alpine meadow although accompanied by topsoil drying. Oecologia 204, 25–34 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05483-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05483-x