Jingyi Ding

Beijing Normal University | bnu

Woody plant encroachment is a major land management issue. Woody removal often aims to restore the original grassy ecosystem, but few studies have assessed the role of woody removal on ecosystem functions and biodiversity at global scales. We collected data from 140 global studies and evaluated how different woody plant removal methods affected bio...

Encroachment of woody plants into savannas and grasslands has increased markedly over the past century due to global changes in climate and intensified land use disturbance (e.g., grazing, fire). Removal of woody plants is mostly used globally to attempt to reinstate open woodlands and grasslands to increase forage plant production for livestock. H...

Tamarix, one of the most widely distributed riparian shrub genera, plays an important role in ecosystem stabilization in arid zones. Various studies have assessed the effect of stressors on Tamarix spp. in riparian plant communities in homogenous habitats. However, less is known about the factors driving variation of Tamarix spp. characteristics ac...

Desert riparian forests are the main restored vegetation community in Heihe River basin. They provide critical habitats and a variety of ecosystem services in this arid environment. Since desert riparian forests are also sensitive to disturbance, examining the spatial distribution and temporal variation of these forests and their influencing factor...

Soil moisture in deep soil layers is a relatively stable water resource for vegetation growth in the semi-arid Loess Plateau of China. Characterizing the variations in deep soil moisture and its influencing factors at a moderate watershed scale is important to ensure the sustainability of vegetation restoration efforts. In this study, we focus on a...

Dryland grazing sustains millions of people worldwide but, when poorly managed, threatens food security. Here we combine livestock and wild herbivore dung mass data from surveys at 760 dryland sites worldwide, representing independent measurements of herbivory, to generate high-resolution maps. We show that livestock and wild herbivore grazing is g...

Background Analysing the status of ecosystem services and their driving mechanisms along environmental gradients is highly important for the reconstruction and protection of regional ecosystems. Exploration of the effects of plant functional traits on ecosystem services is important for revealing the formation mechanisms of ecosystem services. Howe...

Humans depend heavily on nature. Drylands are home to 2.5 billion people, but the extent to which nature contributes to people (NCP) in drylands has been little explored. We examined the global contribution of nature to people, aiming to compare drylands and non-drylands. We predicted a lower contribution in drylands than non-drylands, largely beca...

Grasslands support multiple ecosystem functions and services, and diverse biota, and are critical for human well-being. Grazing is the most pervasive land use in grasslands, but can have damaging effects when poorly managed. How grazing management and the environment interact to affect ecosystem functions globally is less well understood. Addressin...

Alpine grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) are highly vulnerable to various treatments and face significant degradation risks due to global environmental changes. However, the response of these grasslands to different external treatments remains uncertain, and the patterns behind functional group responses are unclear, impeding our ability to re...

Compound hot–dry events cause more severe impacts on terrestrial ecosystems than dry events, while the differences in recovery time (ΔRT) between hot–dry and dry events and their contributing factors remain unclear. Both remote sensing observations and eddy covariance measurements reveal that hot–dry events prolong the recovery time compared with d...

Aim Changes in climate are likely to have major impacts on benefits (i.e., biodiversity and ecosystem services) supported by trees. Here we explore the extent to which trees can support multiple benefits, and the potential tradeoffs among them, under increasing dryness. Location Eastern Australia. Time period 2018–2019. Major taxa studied Trees....

Woody plants are encroaching across terrestrial ecosystems globally, and this has dramatic effects on how these systems function and the livelihoods of producers who rely on the land to support livestock production. Consequently, the removal of woody plants is promoted widely in the belief that it will reinstate former grasslands or open savanna. D...

Perennial plants create productive and biodiverse hotspots, known as fertile islands, beneath their canopies. These hotspots largely determine the structure and functioning of drylands worldwide. Despite their ubiquity, the factors controlling fertile islands under conditions of contrasting grazing by livestock, the most prevalent land use in dryla...

Greenspaces are important for sustaining healthy urban environments and their human populations. Yet their capacity to support multiple ecosystem services simultaneously (multiservices) compared with nearby natural ecosystems remains virtually unknown. We conducted a global field survey in 56 urban areas to investigate the influence of urban greens...

Plant removal is used widely to restore systems encroached by woody plants and to improve ecosystem health and human well‐being. However, the effects of removal are rarely consistent, with a mixture of positive and negative outcomes for ecosystems, making it difficult to develop consistent prescriptions for achieving sustainable management of woody...

Biodiversity loss by grazing pressure has threatened multiple ecosystem functions simultaneously (ecosystem multifunctionality, EMF) in grasslands. Therefore, detecting the relation between EMF and biodiversity under human intervention would provide guidance on the optimization of sustainable grassland management. However, little is known about how...

Declining ecosystem services have prompted numerous studies aiming at developing more sustainable management practices for vegetation restoration. Advances in functional ecology indicate that the sustainable management of afforestation ecosystems should be performed based on plant functional traits, which provides pivotal knowledge for long-term su...

Drylands with fragile socio-ecological systems are vulnerable to soil erosion. China's drylands face the dual threat of water (WAE) and wind erosion (WIE). To mitigate soil erosion in drylands, China has implemented numerous ecological restoration measures. However, whether vegetation and soil have different effects on soil erodibility for water er...

Afforestation and grassland restoration have been proposed as important pathways for nature-based solutions. However, the effects of different ecological restoration projects on multiple ecosystem services are poorly understood, inhibiting our ability to maximize ecosystem services for further restoration. Here, we provide a comprehensive assessmen...

Mechanized approaches to the rehabilitation of degraded rangeland have been extremely popular since the early 1930s but their effectiveness depends on climatic and environmental conditions (e.g. soil texture, pre‐treatment plant cover). We evaluated the effects of pitting, a popular rehabilitation technique based on the creation of elongated soil d...

Soil mosses are among the most widely distributed organisms on land. Experiments and observations suggest that they contribute to terrestrial soil biodiversity and function, yet their ecological contribution to soil has never been assessed globally under natural conditions. Here we conducted the most comprehensive global standardized field study to...

Context Successful conservation requires a detailed understanding of critical habitats required to support different plant and animal populations. This is particularly important for rewilding programs where locally extinct species are often introduced into novel or reintroduced into areas that have been dramatically altered since they were extirpat...

Woody plants (shrubs and trees) are encroaching across the globe, affecting livestock production and terrestrial ecosystem functioning. Despite the widespread practice, there has been no quantitative global assessment of whether removal of encroaching woody plants will re-instate productive grasslands and open savanna. Here we compiled a global dat...

Questions Biocrusts perform critical functional roles in drylands, where they are regulated predominantly by differences in climate and soils. We asked whether biocrust cover and composition differ among sites of varying vegetation cover and condition. Location Subhumid drylands in the Namoi Region, eastern Australia. Methods We assessed the effe...

The arid and semiarid grassland ecosystems are characterized by limited water resources and are generally vulnerable to climate change. Understanding how plants in arid and semiarid ecosystems respond to global climatic variation is crucial for ecological restoration under a changing climate. Although the effects of climate on aboveground biomass (...

Armed conflicts disturb the environment and impair land productivity. Afghanistan has been submerged in conflict for >20 years, affecting the environment dramatically. In this study, we used the Normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) to investigate vegetation's spatial and temporal changes and the potential underpinned mechanisms. We found a...

Vegetation clearance is the major land use change in agricultural landscape, where woody species are removed to support agricultural production. Native woody species are now largely restricted to the thin strips along the road (roadside verges). Despite the importance of roadside verges as refugia for native species, their impacts on ecological fun...

The livestock sector supports billions of people worldwide, yet when poorly managed, can have substantial negative effects on soils and ecosystem functions. Despite numerous studies and reviews of the effects of livestock activity on hydrological functions, a global synthesis of their effects on different biotic (vegetation, herbivore type) and abi...

Soils harbor a diverse range of biodiversity, including microbes and soil animals, which are crucial in supporting ecosystem functions. Despite the well-known effects of biotic and abiotic factors on soil biodiversity, their relative importance on different soil organisms remains less known, reducing our ability to maintain multiple soil communitie...

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jvs.13095] Questions Woody species are crucial biotic components in many of Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems as they support multiple ecosystem functions. The occurrence of woody species (i.e., their likelihood of being present at a single position) is driven by both climate and soil properties. Howev...

Millions of trees are expected to be planted in forested and non‐forested ecosystems during the United Nations Decade of Restoration. Trees and soil organisms are known to interact, and are both crucial for maintaining multiple ecosystem functions. However, little is known about how the bidirectional relationships among above‐ and below‐ground dive...

[Paper can be free accessed by https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1dhe0_OJuFQMd ]. Soil microbes support multiple ecosystem functions in woody biomes and are regulated by both plant communities and soil properties. While most microbes reside in the uppermost soil layer, we have a poor understanding of how the condition of the soil surface affects soil...

Plant‐associated microbes play essential roles in nutrient uptake and plant productivity, but their role in driving plant germination, a critical stage in the plant life cycle, is still poorly understood. We used data from a large‐scale, field‐based soil seed bank study to examine the relationship among plants germinating from the seed bank and soi...

This paper was accepted and the full text will be available after proofreading. Spatial patchiness in resources is a pervasive feature of drylands worldwide. This patchiness manifests itself as two distinct geomorphic zones that are characterised by the loss (runoff) or gain (runon) of resources such as water, seed and organic matter. Most studies...

Kangaroos (Macropus spp., Osphranter sp.) are the most ubiquitous free‐ranging herbivores in Australia. Much has been written on their impacts on plant community composition and how they interact with livestock, particularly in extensive rangelands. Little is known, however, about how kangaroos affect soil function and their relationship with healt...

Aim: Perennial plant communities are crucial for regulating ecological processes and maintaining ecosystem functions. Variation in community structure is driven by both biotic and abiotic factors, reflecting adaptation strategies of plant communities to various environments. While much is known about the response of individual perennial plants to d...

A patchy distribution of soil resources is a characteristic of most natural terrestrial biomes, potentially resulting in spatial variation in multiple soil functions (soil multifunctionality). However, less is known about how soil multifunctionality and its spatial variability respond to increasing dryness across extensive climatic gradients, makin...

Abstract Aims: Perennial plants play important roles in maintaining ecosystem functions by forming fertile islands beneath their canopies. Little is known about how the fertile island effect varies among different patch types and across climatic gradients, or what drives the strength of its effect. Methods: We assessed biotic (plants, biocrusts,...

The impacts of woody encroachment and removal on ecosystems are highly variable and are thought to be related to the traits of the individual woody species. Decisions on whether to remove or to retain woody plants are hampered by a lack of empirical evidence of the relationship between woody traits and the ecosystem consequences of their removal or...

Aim Woody plants vary greatly from tall trees to branching shrubs with increasing dryness. Variation in plant allometry is driven by both biotic and abiotic factors, reflecting different plant adaptation strategies in different environments. Here, we explore how aboveground allometry of different woody plants responds to increasing dryness along an...

The encroachment of woody plants into grasslands, woodland and savanna has increased markedly over the past century, prompting the use of different physical methods to remove woody plants and restore grasses. Roller‐chopping is used extensively in the Americas, but little is known about its long‐term effectiveness for restoration, and whether its e...

The capture and use of water are critically important in drylands, which collectively constitute Earth's largest biome. Drylands will likely experience lower and more unreliable rainfall as climatic conditions change over the next century. Dryland soils support a rich community of microphytic organisms (biocrusts), which are critically important be...

AimsBiocrusts are globally distributed and important for sustaining critical ecosystem functions. Little is known about their continental drivers and how smaller-scale microsite differences might affect biocrusts along aridity gradients. This limits our ability to manage biocrusts effectively under drier climates.Methods We collected data on biocru...

Feral horses occur on several continents, across a wide range of terrestrial biomes, and have had marked impacts on ecosystems worldwide. Despite their oft-reported negative impacts on plants and soils, a global synthesis of their effects has not been attempted. Here we present a meta-analysis of the global impacts of feral horses on ecosystem stru...

Purpose We attempt to describe the cover and management (C) factor more comprehensively through the use of a simple and efficient method. Materials and methods We measure the coverage of each vegetation layer and C factor for 152 sampled plots in the Ansai watershed. We propose four stratified coverage indices (green coverage (VG), total coverage...

Soil erosion control (SEC), carbon sequestration (CAS), and soil moisture (SMO) strongly interact in the semi-arid Loess Plateau. Since SMO has supportive effects on SEC and CAS, it can be considered as ecosystem service (ES), and there is an immediate need to coordinate the relationships among these ecosystem services (ESs) to promote the sustaina...

The American Landscape Ecology Annual Conference was held in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, from 9 to 13 April 2017. The meeting is rich in content, active atmosphere, diverse forms of communication, discussed the latest research in the field of landscape ecology. The relationship between landscape heterogeneity and social environment system is mainly f...

A bibliometric analysis based on the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases was conducted to identify the differences between Chinese and international studies of riparian forests as well as their future research directions. The analysis included publication output, geographical and i...

Desert riparian forests are critical habitats that provide a variety of ecosystem services in arid environments. They are also endangered ecosystem types that are sensitive to disturbance and threatened by desertification. Despite of previous studies stressed on the interactions between desert riparian forests and water availability, the lack of co...

Soil moisture in deep soil layers is a relatively stable water resource for vegetation growth in the semi-arid Loess Plateau of China. Characterizing the spatial variations of deep soil moisture and its influencing factors at a moderate watershed scale is important to ensure the sustainability of vegetation restoration efforts. In this study, we fo...

Creating methods to achieve sustainable development is a global challenge faced by civilization in the 21st century. As an operational element of sustainability science, landscape sustainability science (LSS) plays an important role in the development of methods for sustainable development. Landscape services (LS) is a newly emerging concept associ...