Responses of plant functional groups to natural nitrogen fertility on an alpine grassland in the Qinghai-Tibet plateau

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• 作者：R. Y. Zhang ; X. M. Shi ; W. J. Li ; D. H. Xu ; G. Wang
• 关键词：alpine grassland ; mineralization ; N pool ; stoichiometry ; nitrification
• 刊名：Russian Journal of Ecology
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：November 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：47
• 期：6
• 页码：532-539
• 全文大小：292 KB
• 刊物类别：Biomedical and Life Sciences
• 刊物主题：Life Sciences
  Ecology
  Environment
  Russian Library of Science
  
• 出版者：MAIK Nauka/Interperiodica distributed exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
• ISSN：1608-3334
• 卷排序：47

文摘

Species distribution is often closely associated with soil nutrients in terrestrial ecosystem. In contrast to most manipulated N (nitrogen) experimental studies, there are few observation experiments examining the distribution of species or functional groups along a natural soil N gradient. Alpine meadows with higher soil spatial heterogeneity at fine scale, which have a large gradient in soil N gradient, provides an ideal system to examine the distribution of species or functional groups. Here we used redundancy analysis (RDA) to examine the relationships between soil and plant properties in northeast of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau over two years. The results showed the relative biomass of forbs increased, while those of legumes and grasses decreased with the soil N availability. This suggests that legumes and grasses had stronger tolerance to infertile soils than forbs, which may due to the N₂-fixed for legumes and high nutrient use efficiency for grasses. Furthermore, the positive significant relationships between the percentage of legumes biomass and N: P (phosphorus) ratio were found in the whole community and non-legumes, confirming the presence of legumes improved the vegetation N status even for non-legumes.