Abstract
In the context of global climate change, overgrazing has impacted ecosystem multifunctionality (EMF). However, the influence of different characteristics of microbial communities on EMF under grazing pressures remains unclear. In this study, we examined how microbial community diversity, co-occurrence network structure, and assembly processes influence ecosystem function and multifunctionality under three grazing pressures: light grazing, heavy grazing, and grazing exclusion. Our results show that light grazing significantly increased microbial community diversity, richness, network complexity, and stability compared to heavy grazing. Soil bacterial and fungal communities were predominantly shaped by stochastic processes. As grazing pressure increased, the proportion of deterministic processes in both bacterial and fungal communities also grew. Furthermore, light grazing significantly reduced both ecosystem functions and multifunctionality compared to heavy grazing. We observed that microbial community assembly processes under grazing disturbance can directly or indirectly regulate EMF by shaping community diversity and network structure. The relationship with EMF appears to depend more on diversity than on network structure. Moreover, we emphasize that the complexity and stability of community networks are stronger predictors of EMF changes than diversity alone. In conclusion, the protection and careful management of microbial communities are crucial for enhancing ecosystem resilience and supporting sustainable development.
Data availability
All raw sequencing data have been deposited in the NCBI GenBank Short Read Archive under accession number PRJNA1322087. The datasets generated and/or analyzed during this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Waheed Abdul and Xionghong Liu for their valuable assistance in the grammatical proofreading and data processing.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32260311 and 31960338) and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Natural Science Foundation (2022D01A189).
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K.W. Jiang, Y.F. Wang, and Q.Q. Zhang conceived the study; K.W. Jiang, C. Lv, and H. Li performed the field experiments; H. Li and K.W. Jiang performed the data analysis. K.W. Jiang, Q.Q. Zhang, R. Tuerxunnayi, and P. J. Yu wrote the first draft of the manuscript. Y.F. Wang, C. Lv, P. J. Yu, and K.W. Jiang edited the manuscript. All authors commented on drafts of the manuscript and approved the final version.
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Jiang, K., Lv, C., Wang, Y. et al. Soil microbial community assembly drives ecosystem multifunctionality under grazing disturbance by regulating diversity and network structure.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-35462-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-35462-0
Keywords
- Network complexity
- Stability
- Community assembly
- Ecosystem function
- Grazing
Source: Ecology - nature.com
