Abstract
Background
Annual herbs are crucial components of sandy ecosystems and their community assembly in arid sandy dunes is an intuitive indicator of a degraded ecosystem’s successful restoration. In sandy areas, biocrust and sand burial often co-occur, given the higher diversity and biomass of annual herbs where both factors co-occur than where either does alone. Yet our knowledge of the underlying mechanism is limited.
Methods
A field survey was conducted to verify that the presence of biocrust and sand burial jointly promoted the assembly of herbs. And then controlled simulating experiments were conducted to investigate the individual and collective effects of three biocrusts (bare sand (control), cyanobacterial crust, and moss crust) and three depths (0 (control), 2.5, and 5 mm) of sand burial upon germination, growth of three annual herbs as well as the soil water and nutrition status in a revegetated area of the Tengger Desert.
Results
Biocrust inhibited seed germination of the three annual herbs, but promoted their seedling growth. However, sand burial disrupted the inhibitory influence upon seed germination and strengthened the positive effects of biocrust on seedling growth of all species, by improving the availability of water and nutrients in upper soil.
Conclusion
Mutual complementary effects of biocrust and sand burial promote the establishment, and overall recruitment success of annual herbs. This finding emphasizes the importance of buried disturbance of biocrust in plant community assembly processes, providing an approach to disentangle relationships between biocrust and vascular plants, and a new technique suggestion for ecological restoration in arid sandy areas.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Special thanks are owed to editor and reviewers for their suggestions to improve this manuscript. This study was supported by the grants from the Science and Technology Research Project of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (2022YFDZ0036) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41971142) and Plant and Fungi monitoring projects of Ningxia Shapotou National Nature Reserve.
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YHG, RLJ designed the research. YHG, RLJ, YZ, LNZ, WXY performed the experiments, YPL, YZ, YSW, HTY, LCL analyzed the data. YHG, RLJ, YZ,YLD and YPL wrote and participated to the revision of the manuscript.
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Gao, Y., Jia, R., Liu, Y. et al. Biocrust and sand burial together promote annual herb community assembly in an arid sandy desert area. Plant Soil 491, 645–663 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-023-06142-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-023-06142-z