Diversity‐stability relationships in temperate grasslands as a function of soil pH

Abstract

Diversity-stability relationships in grasslands depend on the environment. Climate change and land degradation potentially alter soil pH and community stability within grassland environments, although it remains unclear how alteration in soil pH affects diversity-stability relationships. From a three-year experiment with acidification and alkalization treatments in three types of grasslands (i.e., desert, typical and meadow grasslands) in Northern China, we found that altered soil pH negatively impacted community biodiversity, especially in desert grasslands. Both soil acidification and alkalization reduced community stability in desert grasslands. Soil alkalization reduced community stability in typical grasslands. Altered soil pH did not affect community stability in meadow grasslands. The reduced community stability by soil acidification in desert grasslands could be attributed to the decreased dominant species stability, whereas the soil alkalization-induced decline of community stability could be attributed to the reducing species asynchrony and dominant species stability. Our results suggest that soil pH-mediated community stability is mainly driven by dominant species stability rather than diversity in desert grassland. Soil nutrients are affected by soil acidification and alkalization and varied among grasslands. Soil acidification enhanced nutrient availability and soil alkalization reduced soil total nutrients, both of which were negatively correlated with soil pH in desert grassland. Such changes in soil nutrients were associated with species asynchrony and then indirectly affected community stability, indicating the importance of soil nutrients in driving community stability. Our study suggests that drier grasslands might face greater stability risks and challenges than wetter grasslands under altered soil pH across spatial gradients of semiarid grasslands.

Different facets of bacterial and fungal communities drive soil multifunctionality in grasslands spanning a 3500 km transect

“…A recent study showed that the biodiversity–soil multifunctionality relationship is aridity dependent (Hu et al, 2021), because plant diversity and soil multifunctionality had a strong positive relationship in less arid regions, while microbial diversity was positively associated with soil multifunctionality in more arid regions along a 4000 km aridity gradient. Furthermore, our result is consistent with previous studies in the grasslands, in which soil pH has been highlighted as being an important driver of multiple soil functions in the Tibetan Plateau and northern China at large scales (Jing et al, 2015; Liu et al, 2022). Recently, Yang et al (2012) revealed that Chinese grassland soils is experiencing significant acidification.…”

Spatial–Temporal Correlations between Soil pH and NPP of Grassland Ecosystems in the Yellow River Source Area, China

“…Similar to our results, soil pH had distinct effects on community stability in different grassland types [ 59 ] and the NPP of each grassland type varies substantially [ 60 ]. As illustrated in Figure 7 , the decreasing pH in temperate steppes, montane meadows, and alpine meadows was accompanied by an increase in NPP over time, whereas swamps, on the contrary, decreased during 2000–2021.…”

Herbivore exclusion stabilizes alpine grassland biomass production across spatial scales

“…In addition, soil properties, such as soil pH and nutrients, can also alter community stability directly or indirectly by influencing species richness, asynchrony or stability (Gilbert et al., 2020; Liu et al., 2022). Our grassland exclosure experiment was conducted at nine sites spanning a large climatic gradient, where soil conditions would presumably differ between sites.…”