Aridity-driven shift in biodiversity–soil multifunctionality relationships

Hu, Weigang and Ran, Jinzhi and Dong, Longwei and Du, Qiajun and Ji, Mingfei and Yao, Shuran and Sun, Yuan and Gong, Chunmei and Hou, Qingqing and Gong, Haiyang and Chen, Renfei and Lu, Jingli and Xie, Shubin and Wang, Zhiqiang and Huang, Heng and Li, Xiaowei and Xiong, Junlan and Xia, Rui and Wei, Maohong and Zhao, Dongmin and Zhang, Yahui and Li, Jinhui and Yang, Huixia and Wang, Xiaoting and Deng, Yan and Sun, Ying and Li, Hailing and Zhang, Liang and Chu, Qipeng and Li, Xinwei and Aqeel, Muhammad and Manan, Abdul and Akram, Muhammad Adnan and Liu, Xianghan and Li, Rui and Li, Fan and Hou, Chen and 刘建全 and He, Jin-Sheng and An, Lizhe and Bardgett, Richard and Schmid, Bernhard and 邓建明 (2021) Aridity-driven shift in biodiversity–soil multifunctionality relationships. Nature Communications, 12 (1): 5350. ISSN 2041-1723

Abstract

Relationships between biodiversity and multiple ecosystem functions (that is, ecosystem multifunctionality) are context-dependent. Both plant and soil microbial diversity have been reported to regulate ecosystem multifunctionality, but how their relative importance varies along environmental gradients remains poorly understood. Here, we relate plant and microbial diversity to soil multifunctionality across 130 dryland sites along a 4,000 km aridity gradient in northern China. Our results show a strong positive association between plant species richness and soil multifunctionality in less arid regions, whereas microbial diversity, in particular of fungi, is positively associated with multifunctionality in more arid regions. This shift in the relationships between plant or microbial diversity and soil multifunctionality occur at an aridity level of ∼0.8, the boundary between semiarid and arid climates, which is predicted to advance geographically ∼28% by the end of the current century. Our study highlights that biodiversity loss of plants and soil microorganisms may have especially strong consequences under low and high aridity conditions, respectively, which calls for climate-specific biodiversity conservation strategies to mitigate the effects of aridification.