Shu Xiangyang, Liu Weijia, Hu Yufu, Xia Longlong, Fan Kunkun, Zhang Yanyan, Zhang Yulin, Zhou Wei
College of Resources, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, China.
Institute of Agricultural Bioenvironment and Energy, Chengdu Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Chengdu, China.
Front Plant Sci. 2023 Aug 1;14:1173962. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1173962. eCollection 2023.
Linkages between microbial communities and multiple ecosystem functions are context-dependent. However, the impacts of different restoration measures on microbial communities and ecosystem functioning remain unclear. Here, a 14-year long-term experiment was conducted using three restoration modes: planting mixed grasses (MG), planting shrub with alone (SA), and planting shrub with plus planting mixed grasses (SG), with an extremely degraded grassland serving as the control (CK). Our objective was to investigate how ecosystem multifunctionality and microbial communities (diversity, composition, and co-occurrence networks) respond to different restoration modes. Our results indicated that most of individual functions (i.e., soil nutrient contents, enzyme activities, and microbial biomass) in the SG treatment were significantly higher than in the CK treatment, and even higher than MG and SA treatments. Compared with the CK treatment, treatments MG, SA, and SG significantly increased the multifunctionality index on average by 0.57, 0.23 and 0.76, respectively. Random forest modeling showed that the alpha-diversity and composition of bacterial communities, rather than fungal communities, drove the ecosystem multifunctionality. Moreover, we found that both the MG and SG treatments significantly improved bacterial network stability, which exhabited stronger correlations with ecosystem multifunctionality compared to fungal network stability. In summary, this study demonstrates that planting shrub and grasses altogether is a promising restoration mode that can enhance ecosystem multifunctionality and improve microbial diversity and stability in the alpine degraded grassland.
微生物群落与多种生态系统功能之间的联系取决于具体环境。然而，不同恢复措施对微生物群落和生态系统功能的影响仍不明确。在此，我们利用三种恢复模式进行了一项为期14年的长期实验：种植混合草（MG）、单独种植灌木（SA）以及种植灌木加混合草（SG），以极度退化的草地作为对照（CK）。我们的目标是研究生态系统多功能性和微生物群落（多样性、组成和共现网络）如何响应不同的恢复模式。我们的结果表明，SG处理中的大多数单项功能（即土壤养分含量、酶活性和微生物生物量）显著高于CK处理，甚至高于MG和SA处理。与CK处理相比，MG、SA和SG处理平均分别显著提高多功能性指数0.57、0.23和0.76。随机森林建模表明，细菌群落的α多样性和组成而非真菌群落驱动了生态系统多功能性。此外，我们发现MG和SG处理均显著提高了细菌网络稳定性，与真菌网络稳定性相比，其与生态系统多功能性的相关性更强。总之，本研究表明，灌木和草一起种植是一种有前景的恢复模式，可增强高寒退化草地的生态系统多功能性并改善微生物多样性和稳定性。
