Abstract
Plant diversity can be affected by both herbivore grazing and soil resources. However, it is unclear if the joint effects of herbivores and soil resources might vary with components of plant diversity. Here, we evaluated the relative and combined effects of herbivore assemblage and soil nitrogen (N) quantity and heterogeneity on the α and β components of plant diversity in a grassland that was subjected to four years of grazing under differing herbivore assemblages (no grazing, cattle grazing, sheep grazing, and mixed grazing). We found that herbivore assemblage combined with soil N quantity explained 41% of the variation in plant α-diversity, while herbivore assemblage combined with soil N heterogeneity explained 15% of the variation in plant β-diversity. The independent effects of herbivore assemblage explained more than those of soil N for both α- and β-diversity (α-diversity: 12% vs. 4%; β-diversity: 18% vs. 16%). We concluded that the effects of herbivores are stronger than those of soil N, and that grazing-induced changes in soil resources are important drivers of plant diversity change, especially α-diversity. Therefore, we suggest that managing herbivore species by accounting for the effects that their grazing can have on soil resources may be significant for plant diversity maintenance.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31772652, U1603235), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFC0500602), the Program for Introducing Talents to Universities (B16011) and the Ministry of Education Innovation Team Development Plan (2013-373). We would like to thank Elizabeth Tokarz at Yale University for her assistance with English language and grammatical editing.
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Zhang, M., Liu, B., Li, G. et al. The relative and combined effects of herbivore assemblage and soil nitrogen on plant diversity. Sci. China Life Sci. 65, 830–837 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-021-1963-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-021-1963-2