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Overgrazing leads to decoupling of precipitation patterns and ecosystem carbon exchange in the desert steppe through changing community composition

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Abstract

Background and aims

Understanding the effects of grazing and precipitation pattern on ecosystem carbon (C) exchange, and their interactions is crucial to predict the transformation of carbon sources and sinks in long-term grazed grassland under climate change.

Methods

We continuously measured net ecosystem CO2 exchange (NEE), gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (ER) under different grazing intensity treatments (i.e., control (CK), light grazing (LG), moderate grazing (MG), and heavy grazing (HG)) during the growing seasons from 2011 to 2013 in a desert steppe on the Mongolian Plateau.

Results

Our results showed that all grazing treatments (irrespective of intensity) significantly reduced ecosystem C fluxes relative to no grazing in all experimental years. With increasing grazing intensity, NEE was suppressed (less negative) by 13–26%, 38–63% and 41–65% in LG, MG and HG plots, respectively. Changes in vegetation coverage, aboveground biomass and soil moisture induced by grazing intensity mainly caused decreases in ecosystem C fluxes in grazed grasslands. However, the interannual variabilities of NEE may be determined by precipitation evenness during the growing season in this arid desert steppe, and there was significant interaction between grazing intensity and precipitation patterns on NEE in our experiment.

Conclusions

Our results highlight the importance of grazing intensity and precipitation patterns in altering ecosystem C exchange, and indicate that overgrazing may lead to the decoupling of precipitation patterns and NEE through changing community composition in desert steppe ecosystems.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Inner Mongolia Academy of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Sciences for providing the experimental site. This research was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32101436, 3210140449, 31861143001) , the Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia (2020BS03015) and Inner Mongolia Special Fund for transformation of scientific and technological achievements (2020CG0055).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Grassland Resources, Ministry of Education, College of Grassland, Resources and Environment, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Hohhot, 010018, Inner Mongolia, People’s Republic of China

    Yunbo Wang, Qingge Zhao, Zhongwu Wang, Mengli Zhao & Guodong Han

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  1. Yunbo Wang
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  2. Qingge Zhao
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  3. Zhongwu Wang
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  4. Mengli Zhao
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Yunbo Wang, Qingge Zhao, Zhongwu Wang, Mengli Zhao and Guodong Han. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Yunbo Wang and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Guodong Han.

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Supplementary file1 (DOCX 17 KB)

ESM 2

Figure S1. Mean values of the grazing-mediated changes in (C) community aboveground biomass (AGB), aboveground biomass of (A) grasses (GS) and (B) shrubs & semishrubs (SS) in 2011, 2012 and 2013. Different lowercase letters on top of the bars indicate significant differences (P < 0.05) among treatments (Duncan’s test) in 2011, 2012 or 2013. LG: Light grazing; MG: Moderate grazing; HG: Heavy grazing. Data are reported as mean ± 1 SD (n = 6). And (D) linear correlations of the grazing-mediated changes in AGB with the grazing-mediated changes in NEE across different plots during the 3 years with correlation coefficients and their significance. *** represents significant relationship at P < 0.001 (PNG 480 kb)

High resolution image (TIF 2246 kb)

ESM 3

Figure S2. The trends in responses of NEE to (A) the very wet days (R95p, mm) and (B) The number of heavy precipitation days >10 mm (R10, Days) across the 3 years. CK: no-grazing; LG: Light grazing; MG: Moderate grazing; HG: Heavy grazing. Data are reported as mean ± 1 SD (n = 6) (PNG 97 kb)

High resolution image (TIF 486 kb)

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Wang, Y., Zhao, Q., Wang, Z. et al. Overgrazing leads to decoupling of precipitation patterns and ecosystem carbon exchange in the desert steppe through changing community composition. Plant Soil 486, 607–620 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-023-05894-y

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