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Aims The Nei MongolSteppe plays an important role for livestock production, and it has been one of the green ecological shelters for Northern China. Enhancing some ecosystem services (provisioning services) in managing the ecosystems may causes reductions of other services, such as regulating and supporting services. The knowledge on how grazing intensity influence the trade-offs is lacking. MethodsIn order to find out the optimized grazing regimes, we conducted an experiment on a typical steppe in Xinlin Gol with four grazing intensities (no grazing, light grazing, moderate grazing and heavy grazing) in the Nei Mongol Steppe. Important findingsOur results showed that: synergetic, trade-offs and no relationships among different ecosystem services existed in all treatments on the managed steppe system. The trade-offs relationship was found between soil respiration rate and net plant biomass growth, and between biodiversity and net photosynthetic rate. However the synergetic relationships were observed between net plant biomass growth and soil water content, between net plant growth biomass and net photosynthetic rate, and also between grassland evapotranspiration rate and biodiversity. The results indicated soil organic carbon was not related to other ecosystem services and functions. Grazing could weaken the conflicts among the ecosystem services. Moderate grazing intensity maximumize ecosystem services and functions.