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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Functional Plant Ecology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1504754
This article is part of the Research Topic Green Growth: Innovations in Plant Science for Biostimulant Applications View all articles

Response of Plant Life forms and Soil Physical Properties to Near-Natural Restoration Measures in Alpine grassland, Tibetan Plateau

Provisionally accepted
Guoxing He Guoxing He Xiaoni Liu Xiaoni Liu *Yali Li Yali Li *Tong Ji Tong Ji
  • College of Grassland Science, Gansu Agricultural University, Lanzhou, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Near-natural restoration measures enhance the stability of plant life forms in degraded grasslands, facilitating the natural succession of plant communities and the long-term sequestration of ecological functions.In this study, we investigated the effects of three natural restoration measures on the alpine meadows of the northeastern Tibetan Plateau: banned grazing (BG), rest grazing (RG), traditional grazing (TG), and continuous grazing (CG). We utilized redundancy analysis (RDA), variation partitioning(VP), hierarchical partitioning (HP), and partial least squares pathway modeling (PLS-PM) to dissect the quantitative relationships between the distribution of plant life forms and soil physical properties under these restoration measures.The results indicated the following: 1) Under each restoration measure, the distribution of life form plants was predominantly characterized by the highest number of hemicryptophytes, followed by geophytes, with the least number of therophytes. We found that the BG treatment had the highest hemicryptophyte height, coverage, aboveground biomass, and importance value, while the CG treatment had the lowest. 2) After near-natural restoration, the soil bulk density (BD) was decreased. The soil moisture characteristics (MC) were increased including soil saturated water content(SSWC), capillary water holding capacity (CWHC), field water capacity (FWC).And capillary porosity (CP) and non-capillary porosity (NP) were increased. 3) VP analysis revealed that MC, BD, and CP together explained 57.4% of the variation in plant life forms communities. 4) The hemicryptophytes benefited from restoration measures and increased CP. In contrast, the decrease in BD negatively affected geophytes. In summary, restoration measures reduce BD by enhancing MC and increasing CP, which affects the distribution of plant life forms. This finding reveals the important role of soil physical properties in plant survival strategies during alpine meadow restoration.

    Keywords: near-natural restoration measures, alpine meadows, Life forms, soil physical properties, Variation partitioning analysis

    Received: 01 Oct 2024; Accepted: 23 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 He, Liu, Li and Ji. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Xiaoni Liu, College of Grassland Science, Gansu Agricultural University, Lanzhou, China
    Yali Li, College of Grassland Science, Gansu Agricultural University, Lanzhou, China

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