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publicNov 2024View details →

Scavenger community and carrion decomposition in a Tibetan alpine meadow

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publicMay 2025View details →

Data from: Modest experimental warming reduces species diversity and biomass of arthropods in a Tibetan alpine meadow

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publicMar 2021View details →

Rare plant species are at a disadvantage when both herbivory and pollination interactions are considered in an alpine meadow

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publicMay 2025View details →

Data from: Nutrient enrichment shifts peak water-use efficiency to wetter conditions in an alpine meadow

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publicJan 2025View details →

The responses of microbial necromass carbon accumulation to climate aridity in alpine meadow soils are dominated by plant species richness

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publicFeb 2025View details →

Reconsidering warming effects on seedling recruitment in Tibetan plateau's alpine meadows via Open-Top chamber experiments

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publicOct 2024View details →

Warming reduces mid-summer flowering plant reproductive success through advancing fruiting phenology in an alpine meadow

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opencc-zeroOct 2020View details →

Phenological changes offset the warming effects on biomass production in an alpine meadow on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

1. Phenology is an important indicator of plant response to environmental changes and is closely correlated with biomass production. However, how changes of phenological events affect plant biomass production when exposed to changing temperature and precipitation remains unclear. 2. We conducted a four-year manipulative experiment of warming and precipitation addition to explore phenology-biomass interactions under climate change in a dry alpine meadow on the central Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau from 2015 to 2018. 3. In dry and warm years, warming delayed phenology and precipitation addition advanced them. Warming decreased biomass of Kobresia pygmaea in 2018 and biomass of Poa pratensis in 2015, 2017 and 2018. However, precipitation addition significantly increased the biomass of Poa pratensis and Potentilla multifida in most of the experimental years. Phenological changes regulated the responses of biomass to treatments. Specifically, delay of green up of P. pratensis and delay of withering of K. pygmaea induced by warming can increase biomass production, but it can be offset by the direct negative effects of warming on biomass. 4. Synthesis. Here we show how warming induced drought tend to decrease biomass production of graminoids and the negative effects of warming on biomass of P. pratensis and K. pygmaea were partially offset by green up postponement and withering postponement, respectively. Our results highlights phenology is a crucial regulator for biomass production under climate change. Hence, both direct and indirect effects of warming and precipitation addition on phenology and biomass cannot be ignored when predicting biomass responses to climate change.

opencc-zeroDec 2015View details →

Data from: Functional dissimilarity, not phylogenetic relatedness, determines interspecific interactions among plants in the Tibetan alpine meadows

The hypotheses suggesting that the nature and strength of species interactions should be determined by phylogenetic relatedness have important implications for the understanding of community structure. However, to date, there is limited empirical evidence to support them. At least two basic conditions need to be met in order to expect species interactions to be determined by evolutionary relatedness: a phylogenetic signal in the traits involved in the interactions and changes in the interactions as species are more ecologically similar. Here, we report results of a removal experiment in the Chinese Tibetan plateau in which we directly assessed if the nature and/or strength of interactions among twelve alpine meadow plant species were influenced by their phylogenetic relatedness and/or their functional dissimilarity. For each plant species, we compared its biomass production when grown alone to its biomass in presence of another species and used it as a measure of species interactions. Competition between pairs of species was more frequent than facilitation, with 60% of interactions resulting in plants producing less biomass when a second species was present. We found no effect of phylogenetic relatedness on the prevalence or intensity of competition or facilitation, presumably as none of the studied traits showed phylogenetic signal. Functional dissimilarity based on maximum plant height alone was the best predictor of both the prevalence and strength of competition and facilitation, followed by functional dissimilarity using all five functional traits. Our results pinpoint the limited capacity of phylogenetic relatedness as predictor of species interactions; underlining the limitations of using phylogenetic dispersion patterns to infer mechanisms of community assembly. On the contrary, when the right functional traits are used, functional dissimilarity among species can predict both the nature and strength of their interactions; accentuating the relevance of trait-based approaches in community ecology research.

opencc-zeroDec 2016View details →

Data from: Asymmetric winter warming advanced plant phenology to a greater extent than symmetric warming in an alpine meadow

The warming of terrestrial high-latitude ecosystems, while increasing, will likely be asymmetric across seasons – where winter non-growing seasons will warm more than summer growing seasons. Asymmetric winter warming in temperature-sensitive ecosystems may delay spring phenological events by reducing the opportunity that a plants' chilling requirement is met. Similarly, symmetric warming can advance spring phenology. To explore the impact of asymmetric warming on plant phenology, we applied a year-round warming and a winter warming treatment to our experimental plots. Over a two-year period, we monitored leaf-out and flowering phenology for 11 plant species. There was variation among species, however, both winter and year-round warming, advanced the leaf-out day and the first flowering day relative to the control treatment. Winter warming advanced leaf-out and flowering phenology by 11.1 (± 2.4) and 12.6 (± 2.9) days, respectively. However, year-round warming had less of an impact advancing leaf-out and flowering phenology by 5.1 (± 2.1) and 10.0 (± 3.0) days, respectively. Our study provides direct evidence that asymmetric winter warming has a larger impact on plant phenology than symmetric year-round warming. Increasing soil temperature in the winter from below to above freezing temperatures advanced the spring phenology of alpine plants. Winter warming increased soil temperature more than year-round warming, which explains why phenology advanced under winter warming more than under year-round warming. In addition, early or mid-season flowering plant species displayed different phenology strategies in warmer winters. Synthesis: Relative to other ecosystems, alpine ecosystems such as the Tibetan Plateau will likely respond to asymmetric warming given the higher amplitude of winter temperature increases due to climatic warming thus seasonal variation in warming should be considered when predicting and modelling the response of alpine ecosystems to climatic change.

opencc-zeroJan 2022View details →

Relative species abundance successfully predicts nestedness and interaction frequency of monthly pollination networks in an alpine meadow

Plant-pollinator networks have been repeatedly reported as cumulative ones that are described with >1 years observations. However, such cumulative networks are composed of pairwise interactions recorded at different periods, and thus may not be able to reflect the reality of species interactions in nature (e.g., early-flowering plants typically do not compete for shared pollinators with late-flowering plants, but they are assumed to do so in accumulated networks). Here, we examine the monthly sampling structure of an alpine plant-pollinator bipartite network over a two-year period to determine whether relative species abundance and species traits better explain the network structure of monthly networks than yearly ones. Although community composition and species abundance varied from one month to another, the monthly networks (as well as the yearly networks described with annual pooled data) had a highly nested structure, in which specialists directly interact with generalist partners. Moreover, relative species abundance predicted the nestedness in both the monthly and yearly networks and accounted for a statistically significant percentage of the variation (i.e., 20%-44%) in the pairwise interactions of monthly networks, but not yearly networks. The combination of relative species abundance and species traits (but not species traits only) showed a similar prediction power in terms of both network nestedness and pairwise interaction frequencies. Considering the previously recognized structural pattern and associated mechanisms of plant-pollinator networks, we propose that relative species abundance may be an important factor influencing both nestedness and interaction frequency of pollination networks.

opencc-zeroFeb 2022View details →

Data from: Increased annual methane uptake driven by warmer winters in an alpine meadow

Pronounced non-growing season warming and changes in soil freeze-thaw (F-T) cycles can dramatically alter net methane (CH4) exchange rates between soils and the atmosphere. However, the magnitudes and drivers of warming impacts on CH4 uptake in different stages of the F-T cycle are poorly understood in cold alpine ecosystems, which have been found to be a net sink of atmospheric CH4. Here, we reported a year-round ecosystem daily CH4 uptake in an alpine meadow on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau after a five-year warming experiment that included a control, a low-level warming treatment (+2.4℃ at 5 cm soil depth), and a high-level warming treatment (+4.5℃ at 5 cm soil depth). We found that warming shortened the F-T cycle under the low-level warming and soils did not freeze under the high-level warming. Although both warming treatments increased the mean CH4 uptake rate, only the high-level warming significantly increased annual CH4 uptake compared to the control. The warming-induced stimulation of CH4 uptake mainly occurred in the cold season, which was mostly during spring thaw under low-level warming and during the frozen winter under high-level warming due to a longer period with thawed soil. We also found that warming significantly stimulated daily CH4 uptake mainly by reducing near-surface soil water content in the warm season, whereas both soil water content and temperature controlled daily CH4 uptake in different ways during the autumn freeze, frozen winter, and spring thaw periods of the control. Our study revealed a strong warming effect on CH4 uptake during the entire F-T cycle in the alpine meadow, especially the unfrozen winter. Our results also suggested the important roles of soil pH, available phosphorus, and methanotroph abundance in regulating annual CH4 uptake in response to warming, which should be incorporated into biogeochemical models for accurately forecasting CH4 fluxes under future climate scenarios.

opencc-by-4.0Apr 2022View details →

2019-2020 AR station alpine meadow ecosystem tower-based observation spectra, GPP and meteorological data

This is the dataset used in the Investigating the Performance of Red and Far-Red SIF for Monitoring GPP of Alpine Meadow Ecosystems paper. The dataset contains canopy red and far-red SIF data, GPP data, NDVI data, photosynthetically active radiation(PAR) data, temperature(Ta) data, and vapor pressure deficit(VPD) data during the 2019 and 2020 growing seasons in the alpine meadow ecosystem at the AR site(100.4643 E, 38.0473 N, altitude 3033 m).

opencc-zeroDec 2016View details →

Data from: The microbially-mediated soil organic carbon loss under degenerative succession in an alpine meadow

Land-cover change has long been recognized as having marked effect on the amount of soil organic carbon (SOC). However, the microbially-mediated processes and mechanisms on SOC are still unclear. In this study, the soil samples in a degenerative succession from alpine meadow to alpine steppe meadow in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau were analyzed using high-throughput technologies, including Illumina sequencing and GeoChip functional gene arrays. The soil microbial community structure and diversity were significantly (P < 0.05) different between alpine meadow and alpine steppe meadow, the microbial ɑ-diversity in alpine steppe meadow was significantly (P < 0.01) higher than in alpine meadow. Molecular ecological network analysis indicated that the microbial community structure in alpine steppe meadow was more complex and tighter than in the alpine meadow. The relative abundance of soil microbial labile carbon degradation genes (e.g., pectin and hemicellulose) was significantly higher in alpine steppe meadow than in alpine meadow, but the relative abundance of soil recalcitrant carbon degradation genes (e.g. chitin and lignin) showed the opposite tendency. The Biolog Ecoplate experiment showed that microbially-mediated soil carbon utilization was more active in alpine steppe meadow than in alpine meadow. Consequently, more soil labile carbon might be decomposed in alpine steppe meadow than in alpine meadow. Therefore, the degenerative succession of alpine meadow because of climate change or anthropogenic activities would most likely decreased SOC and nutrients medicated by changing soil microbial community structure and their functional potentials for carbon decomposition.

opencc-by-4.0Jun 2021View details →

Effects of disturbances on aboveground biomass of alpine meadow in the Yellow River Source Zone, Western China

Dataset for ''Effects of disturbances on aboveground biomass of alpine meadow in the Yellow River Source Zone, Western China''

opencc-by-4.0Nov 2022View details →

Plant community assembly of alpine meadow at different altitudes in Northeast Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Plant community assembly of alpine meadow at different altitudes in Northeast Qinghai-Tibet Plateau related raw data include 3 files: All Species Name, Calculated trait NFI, Pedigree chart.

opencc-zeroMar 2023View details →

Climate warming alters the relative importance of plant root and microbial community in regulating the accumulation of soil microbial necromass carbon in a Tibetan alpine meadow

Climate warming is predicted to considerably affect variations in soil organic carbon (SOC), especially in alpine ecosystems. Microbial necromass carbon (MNC) is an important contributor to stable soil organic carbon pools. However, accumulation and persistence of soil MNC across a gradient of warming are still poorly understood. An eight-year field experiment with four levels of warming was conducted in a Tibetan meadow. We found that low-level (+0-1.5 ℃) warming mostly enhanced bacterial necromass carbon (BNC), fungal necromass carbon (FNC), and total MNC compared with control treatment across soil layers, while no significant effect was caused between high-level (+1.5-2.5 ℃) treatments and control treatments. The contributions of both MNC and BNC to soil organic carbon were not significantly affected by warming treatments across depths. Structural equation modeling analysis demonstrated that the effect of plant root traits on MNC persistence strengthened with warming intensity, while the influence of microbial community characteristics waned along with strengthened warming. Overall, our study provides novel evidence that the major determinants of MNC production and stabilization may vary with warming magnitude in alpine meadows. This finding is critical for updating our knowledge of soil carbon storage in response to climate warming.

opencc-by-4.0Jun 2023View details →

Contrasting response of the water use efficiency to precipitation changes between the alpine meadow and alpine steppe over the Tibetan Plateau

The file of AlpineGrassland_GrowingSeason_WUE is dataset of the growing season water use efficiency of alpine grassland over the tibetan plateau during 1982-2014.

publicFeb 2021View details →

The impact of a native dominant plant, Euphorbia jolkinii, on plant-flower visitor networks and pollen deposition on stigmas of co-flowering species in sub-alpine meadows of Shangri-La, SW China

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