Understanding how grazing activity drives plant community structure or the distribution of specific species in a community remains a major challenge in community ecology. The patchiness or spatial aggregation of specific species can be quantified by analyzing their relative coordinates in the community. Using variance and geostatistical analysis methods, we examined the quantitative characteristics and spatial distribution of Stipa breviflora in a desert steppe in northern China under four different grazing intensities (no grazing, NG, light grazing, LG, moderate grazing, MG, and heavy grazing, HG) at three small spatial scales (10 × 10 cm, 20 × 20 cm, 25 × 25 cm). We found that grazing significantly increased cover, density, and proportion in standing crop of S. breviflora, but decreased height. The spatial distribution of S. breviflora was strongly dependent upon the sampling unit and grazing intensity. The patchiness of S. breviflora reduced with sampling scale, and spatial distribution of S. breviflora was mainly determined by structural factors. The intact clusters of S. breviflora were more fragmented with increasing grazing intensity and offspring clusters spread out from the center of the parent plant. These findings suggest that spatial aggregation can enhance the ability of S. breviflora to tolerate grazing and that smaller isolated clusters are beneficial to the survival of this dominant species under heavy grazing.
Aims
Ecological strategies related to the adaptation of plants to environmental stress have long been studied by ecologists, but few studies have systematically revealed the ecological process of plant adaptation to herbivores as a whole.
Methods
In this study, Stipa breviflora, the dominant species in the desert steppe of Inner Mongolia, was used to analyse its reproductive individual characteristics and seed traits as well as the soil seed bank and spatial patterns under heavy-grazing and no-grazing treatments.
Important Findings
The results showed that the number of reproductive branches positively affected the number of vegetative branches. The analysis of the soil seed bank showed that the density of S. breviflora seeds beneath reproductive S. breviflora individuals was significantly higher than that in bare land. The seed density was also significantly negatively correlated with the seed characteristics and the soil seed bank in bare land. The spatial distribution of S. breviflora was aggregated under heavy grazing. Our results suggest that under heavy grazing, reproductive activity plays a key role in resource allocation. Stipa breviflora evolved the ecological strategy of nearby diffusion by regulating the morphological characteristics of the seeds, which promotes a positive spatial correlation between the juvenile and adult populations at a small scale, thus leading to the formation of “safe islands”.
Grazing is the primary land use in the Hulunber meadow steppe. However, the quantitative effects of grazing on ecosystem carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes in this zone remain unclear. A controlled experiment was conducted from 2010 to 2014 to study the effects of six stocking rates on CO2 flux, and the results showed that there were significant differences in CO2 fluxes by year, treatment, and month. The effects of light and intermediate grazing remained relatively constant with grazing year, whereas the effects of heavy grazing increased substantially with grazing duration. CO2 flux significantly decreased with increasing grazing intensity and duration, and it was significantly positively correlated with rainfall, soil moisture (SM), the carbon to nitrogen ratio (C/N ratio), soil available phosphorus (SAP), soil NH4
+-N, soil NO3
−N, aboveground biomass (AGB), coverage, height, and litter and negatively correlated with air temperature, total soil N (TN) and microbial biomass N (MBN). A correspondence analysis showed that the main factors influencing changes in CO2 emissions under grazing were AGB, height, coverage, SM, NH4
+-N and NO3
−N. Increased rainfall and reduced grazing resulted in greater CO2 emissions. Our study provides important information to improve our understanding of the role of livestock grazing in GHG emissions.
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