Huai Chen

Chengdu Institute of Biology, CAS, China

The Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau (QTP) has experienced atmospheric warming, cryosphere thaw and intensified human activities since the 1970s. These changes have had sometimes striking impacts on the hydrology, ecosystems and biogeochemistry of the region. In this Review, we describe carbon and nitrogen cycling on the QTP. Overall, the QTP has been a net...

Peatlands are an important natural store of carbon. Here, we investigate how carbon dynamics in soils from three distinct layers from a drained peatland in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau might respond to global warming. We incubated Zoige Plateau soil samples that represent oxic surface soil, permanently waterlogged anoxic deep soil, and a transitional...

Introduction With the acceleration of urbanization, human population and built surface in urban areas have increased rapidly, triggering numerous environmental problems. Identification of ecological security pattern (ESP) can be helpful to optimize the interaction and relationship between ecological conservation and socioeconomic development in a g...

Sphagnum mosses are keystone plant species in the peatland ecosystems that play a crucial role in the formation of peat, which shelters a broad diversity of endophytic bacteria with important ecological functions. In particular, methanotrophic and nitrogen-fixing endophytic bacteria benefit Sphagnum moss hosts by providing both carbon and nitrogen....

Climate change and human activities have intensified variations of water table depth (WTD) in wetlands around the world, which may strongly affect greenhouse gas emissions. Here, we analyzed how emissions of CO2, CH4, and N2O from the Zoige wetland on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) vary with the WTD. Our data indicate that the wetland shows net...

Uncertainty in methane (CH4) exchanges across wetlands and grasslands in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) is projected to increase due to continuous permafrost degradation and asymmetrical seasonal warming. Temperature plays a vital role in regulating CH4 exchange, yet the seasonal patterns of temperature dependencies for CH4 fluxes over the wetla...

Background The genus Sanicula L. is a unique perennial herb that holds important medicinal values. Although the previous studies on Sanicula provided us with a good research basis, its taxonomic system and interspecific relationships have not been satisfactorily resolved, especially for those endemic to China. Moreover, the evolutionary history of...

Aims Functional trait-based approaches have been widely used to explore the relationship between plants and their surroundings. Yet, whether phenotypic plasticity (the ability of plants to change their functional traits) and phenotypic integration (the coordinated relationship between functional traits of plants) are differently functional coordina...

Urban rivers are significant hotspots of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, playing important roles in global carbon emission inventories. However, little is known about the effect of ecological restoration on CO2 dynamics in severely polluted urban rivers, and this strongly hindering our understanding of the positive effects of human activities on...

Semiconductor minerals in peatland play a significant role in the stability of the soil carbon pool. Nevertheless, the ecosystem‐scale importance of semiconductor minerals distribution and their influence on carbon stability in peatlands is still to be determined. Therefore, this study investigated the spatial distribution of semiconductor minerals...

Intense grazing may lead to grassland degradation on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, but it is difficult to predict where this will occur and to quantify it. Based on a process-based ecosystem model, we define a productivity-based stocking rate threshold that induces extreme grassland degradation to assess whether and where the current grazing activit...

Earthworms, universal invertebrates in the soil, play an important role in accelerating litter decomposition and recycling elements. Peatlands store 30% of the global soil organic carbon pool but are particularly vulnerable to variations in the water level. As the water level in the peatlands decreased, the abundance of soil fauna increased. Howeve...

The variations in response of the soil prokaryote community structure to long-term climate warming among different vegetation types in alpine areas are not fully understood. After an 18-year warming experiment, changes in the diversity and structure of soil prokaryote communities in alpine and shrub meadows of the Ti-betan Plateau were analyzed bas...

Structural information of grassland changes on the Tibetan Plateau is essential for understanding alterations in critical ecosystem functioning and their underlying drivers that may reflect environmental changes. However, such information at the regional scale is still lacking due to methodological limitations. Beyond remote sensing indicators only...

Climate change is one of the most serious challenges facing mankind. Sphagnum moss plays an important role in the carbon sink of peatland. Understanding the potential distribution of Sphagnum moss under climate change scenarios is critical for the conservation and rational exploitation of it. In this study, we divided the Hengduan Mountains (HDM) i...

Background Peatlands contain about 500 Pg of carbon worldwide and play a dual role as both a carbon sink and an important methane (CH 4 ) source, thereby potentially influencing climate change. However, systematic studies on peat properties, microorganisms, methanogenesis, and their interrelations in peatlands remain limited, especially in China. T...

Wetlands, including peatlands, marshes, swamps, and coastal wetlands, contain more than 30% of terrestrial soil carbon on only 8% of the Earth’s land surface (Mitsch and Gosselink, 2007). Due to their specific biodiversity and ecosystem function, and linking terrestrial and aquatic systems, wetlands are key players in the most important ecosystem s...

Soil carbon (C) sequestration plays a critical role in mitigating climate change. Nitrogen (N) deposition greatly affects soil C dynamics by altering C input and output. However, how soil C stocks respond to various forms of N input is not well clear. This study aimed to explore the impact of N addition on soil C stock and to elucidate the underlyi...

Editorial on the Research Topic Disturbance, resilience and restoration of wetlands

Urban rivers have been proved to be the hot spots of atmospheric methane (CH 4) and nitrous oxide (N 2 O) emissions. However, the rivers across rural-urban interface, which are undergoing significant environmental changes in the process of urbanization, received little attention. In this study, we conducted seasonal investigations in two small subu...

The rhizosphere microbiome (i.e., rhizobiome) plays critical roles in modulating plant performance and fitness. Although plants in natural environments are inevitably affected by neighboring plants, less is known about how attributes of neighboring plant communities affect the rhizobiome of a focal plant. We evaluated the impacts of neighboring pla...

Aims Functional trait-based approaches have been widely used to explore the relationship between plants and their surroundings. However, the response of plant functional traits to water table gradients in alpine wetlands has not been well understood so far. Methods Here, we conducted a mesocosm experiment in which five common plant species were col...

Functional trait-based approaches have been widely used to explore the relationship between plants and their surroundings. Yet, whether phenotypic plasticity and phenotypic integration are differently functional coordination to enhance plant adaptation to declining water levels is still lacking in empirical knowledge. We conducted a mesocosm experi...

Methane (CH4) emissions from streams are an important component of the global carbon budget of freshwater ecosystems, but these emissions are highly variable and uncertain at the temporal and spatial scales associated with watershed urbanization. In this study, we conducted investigations of dissolved CH4 concentrations and fluxes and related envir...

Increased greenhouse gas emissions are causing unprecedented climate change, which is, in turn, altering emissions and removals (referring to the oxidation of atmospheric CH4 by methanotrophs within the soil) of the atmospheric CH4 in terrestrial ecosystems. In the global CH4 budget, wetlands are the dominant natural source and upland soils are the...

Forest ecosystems play an important role in the global CH4 cycle. Understanding and quantifying the contribution and distribution of CH4 sinks and sources in global forest soils is vital for assessing realistic approaches to climate change mitigation. Here, we compiled a dataset of in situ global forest soil CH4 fluxes from published data, incorpor...

The eutrophic lake Dianchi, china, is a hotspot for methane (CH 4) and nitrous oxide (N 2 O) emissions. However, the potential factors driving CH 4 and N 2 O production in the riparian wetlands of Dianchi Lake remain unclear. In the current study, the potential CH 4 and N 2 O production was evaluated using incubation experiments. The abundance and...

More than half of the carbon pools in peatlands are stored in the soil layers below 30 cm, yet little is known about the carbon stabilizing factors at these depths. Although iron oxide minerals are considered to be important for stabilizing organic carbon (OC), their role in the preservation of OC in peatlands, especially in the deep layers, is poo...

Peatlands in Qinghai-Tibetan are degrading with climate change and human activities. Peatland degradation and climate change affect methane emissions. Methanogens are key functional microbes during methane production; however, knowledge of methanogens in degraded peatlands is lacking. Here, we investigated the effects of short-term (1 year) warming...

Streams draining urban areas are usually regarded as hotspots of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions. However, little is known about the coupling effects of watershed pollution and restoration on CH4 and N2O emission dynamics in heavily polluted urban streams. This study investigated the CH4 and N2O concentrations and fluxes in six stre...

The damming of rivers can significantly intercept carbon transportation and regulate dynamic biogeochemistry, which then greatly influence carbon gases (CO2 and CH4) metabolism and emissions. However, little is known about the spatial-temporal pattern and controls of carbon emissions from a cascaded river-reservoir system. In this study, we investi...

Peatlands are vital soil carbon sinks, yet this function is jeopardized by plant carbon which could change the decomposition rate of soil organic carbon, knowing as “priming effect”. How the priming effect depends on depth is a critical question in drained peatland given the heterogeneity of soil layers defined by the water table, which include the...

Wetlands are vulnerable to climate change and human activities. However, the past changes caused by climate and human activities on net primary production (NPP) were unclear on the Zoige Plateau, which is on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. In this study, the impact of climatic and anthropogenic pressure on the NPP of wetlands on the Zoige Plateau from 1...

Although carbon flux monitoring has been studied extensively in terrestrial ecosystems around the world, water vapor flux based on eddy covariance has received little attention. As a special type of terrestrial ecosystem, wetlands are transitions between land and water, material and energy, and therefore of great significance in times of global cha...

Wetlands are an important natural source of methane (CH4), so it is important to quantify how their emissions may vary under future climate change conditions. The Qinghai–Tibet Plateau contains more than a third of China’s wetlands. Here, we simulated temporal and spatial variation in CH4 emissions from natural wetlands on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau...

Peatlands have accumulated enormous amounts of carbon over millennia, and climate changes threatens the release of this carbon into the atmosphere. Fungi are crucial drivers of global carbon cycling because they are the principal decomposer of organic matter in peatlands. However, the fungal community composition and ecological preferences in peat...

To identify hot topics and trends in international research on park city, journal publications on park city were selected from the CNKI and SCI-Expanded databases of Web of Sciences. Methods of scientific knowledge mapping and visual analysis were employed for data analysis to understand the development of research in park city over the past 40 yea...

Peatland carbon accumulation generally increased during past intervals of natural warming. With recent anthropogenically-dominated warming being unprecedented over the past ∼2000 years, however, it is unclear how peatland carbon dynamics may operate compared to those under historical natural warmings. Here we examine the impacts of the recent warmi...

The Qinghai– Tibet Plateau (QTP), which embodies the largest area of permafrost at mid–low altitudes of the world, has been experiencing rapid permafrost degradation and changes in freeze–thaw processes for the past decades. However, the responses and potential feedbacks of the methane flux from peatlands on the QTP to changing freeze–thaw cycles (...

Background Atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition is projected to increase in the next few decades, which may have a marked impact on soil-atmosphere CH4 fluxes. However, the impacts of increased atmospheric N depositions on soil CH4 flux in tropical rainforests are still poorly understood. From January 2015 to December 2018, a field experiment was co...

Climate warming is leading to the water table drawdown in peatlands, and a shift in the structure and productivity of vegetation communities. These events may alter the availability of oxygen and substrate utilized by soil microbes, which may impact the microbial decomposition rate in the different peat layers. We investigated the bacterial and fun...

Tropical rainforest ecosystems are important when considering the global methane (CH4) budget and in climate change mitigation. However, there is a lack of direct and year-round observations of ecosystem-scale CH4 fluxes from tropical rainforest ecosystems. In this study, we examined the temporal variations in CH4 flux at the ecosystem scale and it...

As a sensitive, observable, and comprehensive indicator of climate change, plant phenology has become a vital topic of global change. Studies about plant phenology and its responses to climate change in natural ecosystems have drawn attention to the effects of human activities on phenology in/around urban regions. The key factors and mechanisms of...

As bacteria and archaea are key components in the ecosystem, information on their dynamics in soil profiles is important for understanding the biogeochemical cycles in peatlands. However, little is known about the vertical distribution patterns of bacteria and archaea in the Bitahai peatland, or about their relationships with soil chemical properti...

The impacts of human activities on Zoige peatlands are poorly documented. We determined the concentrations and accumulation rates of As and Hg in a 210Pb-dated peat profile collected from this area and analyzed the correlations between accumulation rates of both As and Hg and other physicochemical properties. To reconstruct recent conditions of As...

Black carbon (BC) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) of peatlands are ideal natural archives of anthropogenic activities, but few comprehensive surveys have been carried out on the BC and PAHs of peatlands on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP). To establish the fate of anthropogenic pollutants in peatlands, this study analyzed the ²¹⁰Pb and ¹...

Living trees in forests emit methane (CH4) from their stems. However, the magnitudes, patterns, drivers, origins, and biogeochemical pathways of these emissions remain poorly understood. We measured in situ CH4 fluxes in poplar stems and soils using static chambers and investigated the microbial communities of heartwood and sapwood by sequencing ba...

The degradation of wetlands due to climate change is of critical concern to human beings worldwide. Little is known about the potential synergistic effects of simultaneous water level reduction and warming on the underground wetland ecosystems. We conducted a 5-month field experiment in the Sanjiang Plain, utilizing open-top chambers and water leve...

As one of the nitrogen (N) limitation ecosystems, alpine meadows have significant effects on their structure and function. However, research on the response and linkage of vegetation-soil to short-term low-level N deposition with rhizosphere processes is scant. We conducted a four level N addition (0, 20, 40, and 80 kg N ha−1 y−1) field experiment...

Changes in freeze–thaw processes as a result of climate change significantly affect the carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems, especially peatlands. The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau contains substantial permafrost and seasonal frozen soils and its peatlands feature a huge carbon stock highly sensitive to global change. In this paper, we used an eddy...

Anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM), an important biological process to reduce global methane emissions to the atmosphere, can utilize methane as an electron donor to reduce sulfate, nitrate, nitrite, iron, manganese, AQDS (9,10-anthraquinone-2,6-disulfonate), etc.; thus, AOM has been a hot topic in global climate change research in recent years....

The rhizosphere priming effect (RPE) is vital in soil organic matter turnover，but its role in peatlands remains unclear, especially when considering different water levels. In this study, we measured the CO2 emission rate from rhizosphere and bulk soil of peatland at different water levels, together with isotope of ¹³C, to evaluate the RPE in peatl...

The surfaces of rivers are considered important sources of atmospheric methane (CH4), however research on this topic is still constrained, especially in freshwater rivers and with the consideration of spatial heterogeneity. Three regions (upper reaches, midstream and downstream) were selected to examine the CH4 fluxes from a freshwater river surfac...

An environment transitional zone (ETzone) is usually deemed as a hotspot in biogeochemical cycle, but little is known about its response to climate change. A typical ETzone develops at the subsurface of peatland after experiencing long-term water table fluctuation, characterized by alternative aerobic and anaerobic conditions. By an extensive incub...

Soil microbes are crucial for improving soil quality and productivity. Plastic film mulch (FM), in conjunction with fertilization, has significantly improved crop yields over vast areas of dryland production. However, how these practices affect soil microbial communities, especially as regards co-occurrence patterns within microbial taxa, is unclea...

Ruminants contribute significantly to global methane (CH4) emissions. This study aimed to evaluate the in vitro effects of monensin sodium salt (MSS) and disodium fumarate (DF) on CH4 production, rumen fermentation, and microbial community, with different substrates. The addition of MSS and DF, alone and in combination, significantly reduced the co...

There is a strong correlation between iron oxide mineral and organic carbon (OC) concentrations. However, the role of iron oxide minerals in the preservation of OC in peatlands is poorly understood. In this study, we collected soil samples from 10 peatlands in central and west China to comprehensively investigate the concentration, characteristics,...

The peatlands of the Zoige Plateau are an important global carbon source that is currently under threat as a result of drainage for grazing. How drainage affects the microbial diversity and activity in peatlands is unclear. This study examined the response of microbial communities at two sites to short-term drainage (3 years) and long-term drainage...