ArticleNature plants2025
Grassland degradation alters plant and soil biodiversity-multifunctionality relationships.
Article in Nature plants, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Precipitation Regulates Phenological Responses of Annual and Perennial Forbs to Warming and Degradation in an Alpine Meadow on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Consequences of agricultural deforestation and subsequent afforestation on soil biodiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Microbial functional gene assembly is associated with soil carbon and nitrogen dynamics during grassland degradation.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Microbial network and its relationship with plants reflect the restoration of grasslands during a five-year period.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
20 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Biodiversity is known to promote ecosystem multifunctionality (EMF), but how grassland degradation influences the relationship between biodiversity and EMF remains unclear. Here, using paired observations at 44 sites (a total of 792 sampling quadrats) along a 2,600 km transect, we test how moderate grassland degradation influences 20 surrogates of ecosystem functions, EMF, plant richness, soil bacterial, fungal and protist richness, and biodiversity-EMF relationships in Tibetan alpine grasslands. Our results reveal significant declines in individual ecosystem functions and EMF with moderate grassland degradation. By contrast, both plant richness and integrated soil biodiversity exhibit significant increases. The structural equation models analyses show that following degradation, the effect of soil biodiversity on EMF strengthens, whereas that of plant richness weakens. These findings offer large-scale empirical evidence that moderate grassland degradation can amplify both soil biodiversity and its functional importance, emphasizing the key role of below-ground biodiversity in supporting ecosystem functioning in degraded grasslands.
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