Dataset Information

Identification of the important environmental factors influencing natural vegetation succession following cropland abandonment on the Loess Plateau, China.

ABSTRACT: Identification of typical vegetation succession types and their important influencing factors is an important prerequisite to implement differential vegetation and soil management after land abandonment on the Loess Plateau, China. However, there is no reported study specifically on the identification of vegetation types and their important factors as well as the thresholds of the important factors for classification of the vegetation types, based on the medium- to long-term succession of natural vegetation after cropland abandonment. We collected vegetation and soil data on the natural vegetation with the longest 60-year-old forest communities that developed after cropland abandonment and analyzed the data using two-way indicator species analysis, detrended correspondence analysis, direct canonical correspondence analysis and classification tree model. The vegetation communities were classified into five distinct vegetation types, including Artemisia scoparia, Lespedeza davurica and Stipa bungeana, Artemisia giraldii pamp, Sophora viciifolia, Quercus liaotungensis and Biota orientalis. The years after cropland abandonment and soil C/N were further identified as important factors determining the types of vegetation. Likewise, it was observed that most of the investigated soil nutrient variables and soil texture-related variables improved with the vegetation succession while soil water in the surface layers showed a decreasing trend. These findings may provide an ecological basis for site-specific management of vegetation types after cropland abandonment in the medium-long term on the Loess Plateau. Our results encourage further exploration of vegetation succession and their important factors based on longer periods of vegetation succession after cropland abandonment under more soil and climatic conditions on the mountainous areas as the Loess Plateau.

SUBMITTER: Zhang Z

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7668204 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Identification of the important environmental factors influencing natural vegetation succession following cropland abandonment on the Loess Plateau, China.

Zhang Zhenguo Z Wang Mingming M Liu Jikai J Li Xinwei X

PeerJ 20201113

Identification of typical vegetation succession types and their important influencing factors is an important prerequisite to implement differential vegetation and soil management after land abandonment on the Loess Plateau, China. However, there is no reported study specifically on the identification of vegetation types and their important factors as well as the thresholds of the important factors for classification of the vegetation types, based on the medium- to long-term succession of natura ...[more]

PMID: 33240658

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Project description:Soil bacterial communities play an important role in nutrient recycling and storage in terrestrial ecosystems. Loess soils are one of the most important soil resources for maintaining the stability of vegetation ecosystems and are mainly distributed in northwest China. Estimating the distributions and affecting factors of soil bacterial communities associated with various types of vegetation will inform our understanding of the effect of vegetation restoration and climate change on these processes. In this study, we collected soil samples from 15 sites from north to south on the Loess Plateau of China that represent different ecosystem types and analyzed the distributions of soil bacterial communities by high-throughput 454 pyrosequencing. The results showed that the 142444 sequences were grouped into 36816 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) based on 97% similarity. The results of the analysis showed that the dominant taxonomic phyla observed in all samples were Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, Chloroflexi, Acidobacteria and Planctomycetes. Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria were the two most abundant groups in all samples. The relative abundance of Actinobacteria increased from 14.73% to 40.22% as the ecosystem changed from forest to sandy, while the relative abundance of Proteobacteria decreased from 35.35% to 21.40%. Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria had significant correlations with mean annual precipitation (MAP), pH, and soil moisture and nutrients. MAP was significantly correlated with soil chemical and physical properties. The relative abundance of Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria and Planctomycetes correlated significantly with MAP, suggesting that MAP was a key factor that affected the soil bacterial community composition. However, along with the MAP gradient, Chloroflexi, Bacteroidetes and Cyanobacteria had narrow ranges that did not significantly vary with the soil and environmental factors. Overall, we conclude that the edaphic properties and/or vegetation types are driving bacterial community composition. MAP was a key factor that affects the composition of the soil bacteria on the Loess Plateau of China.

Dataset Information

Identification of the important environmental factors influencing natural vegetation succession following cropland abandonment on the Loess Plateau, China.

Publications

Identification of the important environmental factors influencing natural vegetation succession following cropland abandonment on the Loess Plateau, China.

Similar Datasets

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