No abstract

Although the influence of mechanical sand control techniques on vegetation on degraded sand dunes has received much attention for a long time, our understanding of the underlying processes of plant community formation is not yet strong. Analyses of trends in the turnover and nestedness components of beta diversity can be informative of the process of response to sand dune stabilization. In this study, we applied a field investigation of sand dunes at different stabilization stages in northern China. We then used Baselga's method to calculate total beta diversity and partition it into spatial turnover and nestedness to clarify the underlying community change processes. Our study indicated that the implementation of straw checkerboard techniques significantly increased the beta diversity of the community, leading to species heterogeneity. Species turnover was the main contributor to species beta diversity, and it was caused by high environmental heterogeneity with sand dune stabilization. The contribution of the nestedness component to beta diversity decreased with dune stabilization, indicating that with stabilization, dissimilarity was largely driven by variation in community composition rather than differences in taxonomic richness. This study provides insights into the underlying variation in species composition among sites where mechanical sand fixation engineering has been implemented and important guidelines for combating desertification.