{"title":"Litter quality outweighs climate in driving grassland root decomposition.","authors":"Jingjing Yang, Zhanbo Yang, Runzhi Zhang, Pingting Guan, Taihai Xu, Yao Tang, Guoling Ren","doi":"10.3389/fpls.2025.1639369","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Introduction: </strong>Root decomposition plays a critical role in nutrient cycling and carbon storage in grassland ecosystems, yet its global drivers remain poorly understood.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>The study synthesized global data on root decomposition in grasslands to assess the relative importance of climate and litter quality, and to quantify the effects of environmental and biotic factors using a comprehensive meta-analysis.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Results indicated that, at the global scale, litter quality exerted a stronger influence on root decomposition than climatic variables. Random forest analysis identified the ratio of acid-unhydrolyzable residue to nitrogen (AUR:N) and AUR as the most important predictors of mass loss, both of which were significantly and negatively correlated with mass loss. The meta-analysis further demonstrated that both environmental and biotic factors significantly affected root decomposition. Among environmental factors, nitrogen addition (+4.49%), phosphorus addition (+16.26%), warming (+9.80%), increased precipitation (+5.95%), and elevated CO<sub>2</sub> (+14.03%) were found to promote root decomposition, while reduced precipitation (-15.60%) had the negative effect. With respect to biotic factors, grazing (+7.51%) significantly increased decomposition, whereas vegetated soil (-27.84%), increased plant species richness (-4.99%), increased root litter richness (-5.93%), home-field decomposition (-4.34%), and soil biota exclusion (-10.40%) decreased it.</p><p><strong>Discussion: </strong>These findings highlight the dominant role of litter quality over climate in regulating root decomposition at a global scale, and underscore the sensitivity of belowground processes to environmental and biotic disturbances in grassland ecosystems.</p>","PeriodicalId":12632,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers in Plant Science","volume":"16 ","pages":"1639369"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1000,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12521445/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Frontiers in Plant Science","FirstCategoryId":"99","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2025.1639369","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/1/1 0:00:00","PubModel":"eCollection","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PLANT SCIENCES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Introduction: Root decomposition plays a critical role in nutrient cycling and carbon storage in grassland ecosystems, yet its global drivers remain poorly understood.
Methods: The study synthesized global data on root decomposition in grasslands to assess the relative importance of climate and litter quality, and to quantify the effects of environmental and biotic factors using a comprehensive meta-analysis.
Results: Results indicated that, at the global scale, litter quality exerted a stronger influence on root decomposition than climatic variables. Random forest analysis identified the ratio of acid-unhydrolyzable residue to nitrogen (AUR:N) and AUR as the most important predictors of mass loss, both of which were significantly and negatively correlated with mass loss. The meta-analysis further demonstrated that both environmental and biotic factors significantly affected root decomposition. Among environmental factors, nitrogen addition (+4.49%), phosphorus addition (+16.26%), warming (+9.80%), increased precipitation (+5.95%), and elevated CO2 (+14.03%) were found to promote root decomposition, while reduced precipitation (-15.60%) had the negative effect. With respect to biotic factors, grazing (+7.51%) significantly increased decomposition, whereas vegetated soil (-27.84%), increased plant species richness (-4.99%), increased root litter richness (-5.93%), home-field decomposition (-4.34%), and soil biota exclusion (-10.40%) decreased it.
Discussion: These findings highlight the dominant role of litter quality over climate in regulating root decomposition at a global scale, and underscore the sensitivity of belowground processes to environmental and biotic disturbances in grassland ecosystems.
期刊介绍：
In an ever changing world, plant science is of the utmost importance for securing the future well-being of humankind. Plants provide oxygen, food, feed, fibers, and building materials. In addition, they are a diverse source of industrial and pharmaceutical chemicals. Plants are centrally important to the health of ecosystems, and their understanding is critical for learning how to manage and maintain a sustainable biosphere. Plant science is extremely interdisciplinary, reaching from agricultural science to paleobotany, and molecular physiology to ecology. It uses the latest developments in computer science, optics, molecular biology and genomics to address challenges in model systems, agricultural crops, and ecosystems. Plant science research inquires into the form, function, development, diversity, reproduction, evolution and uses of both higher and lower plants and their interactions with other organisms throughout the biosphere. Frontiers in Plant Science welcomes outstanding contributions in any field of plant science from basic to applied research, from organismal to molecular studies, from single plant analysis to studies of populations and whole ecosystems, and from molecular to biophysical to computational approaches.
Frontiers in Plant Science publishes articles on the most outstanding discoveries across a wide research spectrum of Plant Science. The mission of Frontiers in Plant Science is to bring all relevant Plant Science areas together on a single platform.
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