Xin Jing

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Lanzhou University

Aims Biodiversity is often positively related to the capacity of an ecosystem to provide multiple functions simultaneously (i.e., multifunctionality). However, there is some controversy over whether biodiversity-multifunctionality relationships depend on the number of functions considered. Particularly, investigators have documented contrasting fin...

Aim An important research question in ecology is how climate and the biodiversity of aboveground plants and belowground microbiomes affect ecosystem functions such as nutrient pools. However, little is studied on the concurrent role of above- and belowground species composition in shaping the spatial distribution patterns of ecosystem functions acr...

Biodiversity serves as the fundamental underpinning for ecosystem functions and services. As a result of human‐induced global change, there is a growing awareness of the substantial alterations in terrestrial above‐ground biodiversity, particularly within alpine regions. However, it remains uncertain whether below‐ground biodiversity will exhibit s...

A fundamental challenge in soil macroecology is to understand how microbial community structure shapes ecosystem function along environmental gradients of the land surface at broad spatial scales (i.e. the horizontal dimension). However, little is known about microbial community structure–function relationships in extreme environments along environ...

Recent droughts have strongly impacted forest ecosystems and are projected to increase in frequency, intensity, and duration in the future together with continued warming. While evidence suggests that tree diversity can regulate drought impacts in natural forests, few studies examine whether mixed tree plantations are more resistant to the impacts...

Global climate changes increased the frequency of snowfall reduction events in the Northern Hemisphere, consequently suppressing plant productivity. Grazing, the most widespread use of grasslands, influences productivity in response to climatic extremes by shaping community structure. Since grazing could disrupt normal plant growth and reproduction...

Asymmetric seasonal warming trends are evident across terrestrial ecosystems, with winter temperatures rising more than summer ones. Yet, the impact of such asymmetric seasonal warming on soil microbial carbon metabolism and growth remains poorly understood. Using ¹⁸ O isotope labeling, we examined the effects of a decade-long experimental seasonal...

Warming and precipitation anomalies affect terrestrial carbon balance partly through altering microbial eco-physiological processes (e.g., growth and death) in soil. However, little is known about how such processes responds to simultaneous regime shifts in temperature and precipitation. We used the ¹⁸ O-water quantitative stable isotope probing ap...

Warming and precipitation anomalies affect terrestrial carbon balance partly through altering microbial eco-physiological processes (e.g., growth and death) in soil. However, little is known about how such processes responds to simultaneous regime shifts in temperature and precipitation. We used the 18 O-water quantitative stable isotope probing ap...

Warming and precipitation anomalies affect terrestrial carbon balance partly through altering microbial eco-physiological processes (e.g., growth and death) in soil. However, little is known about how such processes responds to simultaneous regime shifts in temperature and precipitation. We used the 18 O-water quantitative stable isotope probing ap...

Grassland biodiversity is vital for the provision of multiple ecosystem functions, termed ecosystem multi-functionality. As an effective practice of grassland management, grazing exclusion is widely used to restore the ecosystem multifunctionality of degraded grasslands, but it might not be always beneficial for conserving grassland biodiversity. M...

Nitrogen availability limits the net primary productivity in alpine meadows on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau, which is regulated by ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms. However, little is known about the elevational patterns of soil ammonia oxidizers in alpine meadows. Here, we investigated the potential nitrification rate (PNR), abundance, and communit...

Elevational gradients offer powerful natural experiments for testing how soil organic carbon (SOC) responds to environmental changes (e.g., climate, plant inputs, and soil geochemistry) across a wide range. Exchangeable calcium (Ca ex) emerges as an important geochemical driving factor of SOC content in arid regions, yet its significance in regulat...

Changes in species composition and management operations can have heavy effects on Mediterranean forest ecosystem. However, how these drivers influence the capacity of Mediterranean forests to provide multiple ecosystem functions remains poorly understood. This study evaluates ecosystem multi-functionality (EMF) in Mediterranean forests, comparing...

Warming and precipitation anomalies affect terrestrial carbon balance partly through altering microbial growth and death in soil. However, little is known about how such eco-physiological traits responds to simultaneous regime shifts in temperature and precipitation. We used the 18O-water quantitative stable isotope probing approach to estimate bac...

Anthropogenic eutrophication is known to impair the stability of aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP), but its effects on the stability of belowground (BNPP) and total (TNPP) net primary productivity remain poorly understood. Based on a nitrogen and phosphorus addition experiment in a Tibetan alpine grassland, we show that nitrogen addition...

Context Tibetan alpine ecosystems are among the world’s fastest-warming natural systems, and consequently, are expected to undergo dramatic changes in their ecological processes. However, despite the importance of ants in mediating these ecological processes, it remains unclear how they will respond to the rapid climate warming on the Tibetan Plate...

The alpine grassland ecosystem is a biodiversity hotspot of plants on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, where rapid climate change is altering the patterns of plant biodiversity along elevational and seasonal gradients of environments. However, how belowground microbial biodiversity changes along elevational gradient during the growing season is not wel...

Warming and precipitation anomalies affect terrestrial carbon balance partly through altering microbial growth and death in soil. However, little is known about how such eco-physiological traits responds to simultaneous regime shifts in temperature and precipitation. We used the ¹⁸ O-water quantitative stable isotope probing approach to estimate ba...

Soil inorganic carbon (SIC) is of key importance to the global carbon cycle and mitigating climate change. However, decades of agricultural expansion in the drylands have resulted in vast and fragmented agricultural landscapes and have potentially affected SIC. Previous studies investigating the impact of agricultural expansion on SIC have primaril...

Microbial communities in soils are generally considered to be limited by carbon (C), which could be a crucial control for basic soil functions and responses of microbial heterotrophic metabolism to climate change. However, global soil microbial C limitation (MCL) has rarely been estimated and is poorly understood. Here, we predicted MCL, defined as...

• Bacterial richness declined but fungal richness increased under salinization.• Bacteria did not become interactively compact or facilitative under salinization.• Fungi exhibited more compartmentalized and competitive patterns under salinization.• Fungal stability showed steeper increases under salinization than bacterial stability.Soil salinizati...

The understanding of soil microbial resource limitation has important implications for belowground nutrient cycling. Climate is a primary factor that regulates microbial resource limitation directly and indirectly. Elevational gradient has been used as a substitution of latitudinal gradient in ecological studies because the former displays a wide r...

Climate warming is changing plant sexual reproduction, having consequences for species distribution and community dynamics. However, the magnitude and direction of plant reproductive efforts (e.g., number of flowers) and success (e.g., number and mass of fruits or seeds) in response to warming have not been well-characterized. Here we generated a g...

Background and Aims: Climate change and biodiversity loss are two major changes that human society is experiencing. Climate change affects all aspects of biodiversity and is a major driver of biodiversity loss; in turn, biodiversity loss exacerbates climate change. Therefore, halting or even reversing climate change and biodiversity loss is a globa...

A growing body of work examines the direct and indirect effects of climate change on ecosystems, typically by using manipulative experiments at a single site or performing meta-analyses across many independent experiments. However, results from single-site studies tend to have limited generality. Although meta-analytic approaches can help overcome...

Human activities cause widespread changes in landscape composition, which can affect ecosystem services produced by these landscapes. It is usually believed that ecosystem services can be maximized only when we eliminate all human activities. However, this belief is not the case, at least in dryland ecosystems. Here, a gradient of human activity in...

Laboratory incubation is a commonly used method to measure the decomposition of soil organic carbon (SOC). While incubation experiments are conducted across a wide range of durations that may vary from hours to years, no method is available to determine an optimal duration of the incubation experiment so that SOC decomposition can be best understoo...

Soil microbes have a major impact on microbial function in extreme environments, such as deserts, where environmental factors such as salinity and soil water act as strong filters to community structure. In fact, environmental filtering in these extreme environments can occur over even small gradients in soil depth, which is often overlooked, but i...

The direct and indirect effects of climate change can affect, and are mediated by, changes in animal behaviour. However, we often lack sufficient empirical data to assess how large‐scale disturbances affect the behaviour of individuals, which scales up to influence communities. Here, we investigate these patterns by focusing on the foraging behavio...

Biodiversity is crucial for the provision of ecosystem functions. However, ecosystems are now exposed to a rapidly growing number of anthropogenic pressures, and it remains unknown whether biodiversity can still promote ecosystem functions under multifaceted pressures. Here we investigated the effects of soil microbial diversity on soil functions a...

Extreme precipitation and drought events are predicted to become more intense and more frequent over the Amazon rainforest. Because changes in forest dynamics could prompt strong feedback loops to the global climate, it is of crucial importance to gain insight into the response of tropical forests to these recurring extreme climatic events. Here, w...

Salinization poses great threats to soil fungal communities that would cause the losses of ecosystems services. Soil fungal communities are composed of different functional guilds such as saprotrophic, symbiotrophic, and pathotrophic fungi, and each guild includes many rare taxa and a few abundant taxa. Despite of low abundance, rare taxa may be cr...

Globally, higher inputs of acid deposition and anthropogenic reactive nitrogen cause lower pH in soils, that is, soil acidification, which may broadly influence both above‐ and below‐ground biota and their habitats. However, we know little about the consequences of soil acidification for a wide range of ecosystem functions and services (i.e. ecosys...

Spanish black pine ( Pinus nigra Arn ssp . salzmannii ) is the most widely distributed pine species in mountain areas of the Mediterranean Basin and is commonly used for afforestation in endangered and degraded areas. Despite its importance, little is known regarding the factors driving seedling survival for this species, which may hamper afforesta...

Tree species diversity promotes multiple ecosystem functions and services. However, little is known about how above- and belowground resource availability (light, nutrients, and water) and resource uptake capacity mediate tree species diversity effects on aboveground wood productivity and temporal stability of productivity in European forests and w...

Contour-felled log debris (CFD) and log erosion barriers (LEB) are two restoration practices used worldwide on hillslopes to avoid soil erosion after wildfires. Although significant work has evaluated the effectiveness of these practices on soil loss prevention, their effects on soil properties have been little researched to date. Here, the effects...

Biodiversity-both above-and belowground-influences multiple functions in terrestrial ecosystems. Yet, it is unclear whether differences in above-and belowground species composition (β-diversity) are associated with differences in multiple ecosystem functions (e.g., spatial turnover in ecosystem function). Here, we partitioned the contributions of a...

Our ability to predict the outcome of invasion declines rapidly as non-native species progress through intertwined ecological barriers to establish and spread in recipient ecosystems. This is largely due to the lack of systemic knowledge on key processes at play as species establish self-sustaining populations within the invaded range. To address t...

Biodiversity experiments have identified both complementarity and selection as important drivers of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. However, their relative importance in above‐ and below‐ground ecosystem compartments of mature forests remains yet to be explored. We adopted a trait‐based approach to partition biodive...

Soil microbial biomass is key to improving the prediction of soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics by modeling. However, the driving mechanism of microbial biomass of different groups with soil depth is poorly understood across sites. Here, we compiled the biomass of different microbial groups (e.g., fungi, bacteria, gram-positive bacteria G + , and g...

Abstract The impacts of warming on communities and ecosystems are predicted to be significant in mountain ecosystems because physiological processes, including rates of carbon (C) cycling, are often more temperature‐sensitive in colder environments. Plant biodiversity can also influence C exchange, yet few studies integrate how biotic and abiotic f...

Aim Most existing studies that examined the biotic mechanisms of ecosystem stability have focused on aboveground biodiversity. Whether and how belowground biodiversity affects the stability of natural ecosystems is largely unknown. In the present study, we investigated the relationships between above- and belowground biodiversity and the temporal s...

Saline-sodic soils cover ∼10% of the global land surface and deliver various ecosystem services to human society in the arid/semiarid regions. Flue gas desulfurization gypsum (FGDG), a byproduct from coal-fired power plants, is widely used to ameliorate saline-sodic soils. Here, we aimed to quantify the impacts of FGDG application on multiple soil...

Soil microbial biomass carbon (SMBC) is important in regulating soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics along soil profiles by mediating the decomposition and formation of SOC. The dataset (VDMBC) is about the vertical distributions of SOC, SMBC, and soil microbial quotient (SMQ = SMBC/SOC) and their relations to environmental factors across five contin...

The Three Gorges Dam (TGD) is the world's largest hydropower construction. It can significantly impact contaminant transport in the Yangtze River–East China Sea Continuum (YR–ECSC). In addition to evaluating the impact of the TGD on the deposition of contaminants in the reservoir, we also address their cycles in the river below the dam and in the c...

Small changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) may have great influences on the climate-carbon (C) cycling feedback. However, there are large uncertainties in predicting the dynamics of SOC in soil profiles at the global scale, especially on the role of soil microbial biomass in regulating the vertical distribution of SOC. Here, we developed a database...

Anthropogenic nitrogen (N) deposition, mainly driven by reactive N emissions from agricultural and industrial activities, has been enhanced dramatically in China. The enhancement of N deposition has aroused increasing concerns about its effects on ecosystem health and function. Forest covers more than one fifth of the national land area in China an...

Background and aims Human activities have significantly increased nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P) inputs to terrestrial ecosystems. However, the impact of N and P enrichment on soil microbial community structure and functioning in temperate and alpine grassland ecosystems remains unclear. Methods In this study, we investigated the responses of so...

Soil enzymes produced by microorganisms transform substrates in the soil carbon (C) and nutrient cycles. Limitations in C and other nutrients could affect microbial biosynthesis processes, so we expect that soil enzyme activity will reflect microbial deficiencies in C, nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) at a large spatial scale. We collected soil from...

The roles of soil fungal diversity and community composition in regulating soil respiration when above‐ and below‐ground plant carbon (C) inputs are excluded remain unclear. In the present study, we aimed to examine the following. (a) How does the exclusion of above‐ and below‐ground plant C inputs affect soil respiration and soil fungi singly and...

Soil bacteria are key to ecosystem function and maintenance of soil fertility. Leveraging associations of current geographic distributions of bacteria with historic climate, we predict that soil bacterial diversity will increase across the majority (∼75%) of the Tibetan Plateau and northern North America if bacterial communities equilibrate with ex...

The crucial biogeochemical processes such as carbon and nutrient cycling are increasingly altered at the ecosystem scale by global environmental changes. Although soil extracellular enzyme activities (EEAs) play a critical role in biogeochemical processes, the global patterns of soil EEAs in a changing world remain elusive. Here, we synthesized eig...

Soil bacteria are key to ecosystem function and maintenance of soil fertility. Leveraging associations of current geographic distributions of bacteria with historic climate, we predict that soil bacterial diversity will increase across the majority (~75%) of the Tibetan Plateau and northern North America if bacterial communities equilibrate with ex...

Seasonal soil freeze-thaw events may enhance soil nitrogen transformation and thus stimulate nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions in cold regions. However, the mechanisms of soil N2O emission during the freeze-thaw cycling in the field remain unclear. We evaluated N2O emissions and soil biotic and abiotic factors in maize and paddy fields over 20 months i...

Rapid increase of global nitrogen (N) deposition has greatly altered carbon cycles and functioning of forest ecosystems. Previous studies have focused on changes in carbon dynamics of temperate and subtropical forests through N enrichment experiments; however, the effects of N deposition on tree growth remain inconsistent, especially in tropical fo...

Increasing nitrogen (N) deposition has aroused large concerns because of its potential negative effects on forest ecosystems. Although microorganisms play a vital role in ecosystem carbon (C) and nutrient cycling, the effect of N deposition on soil microbiota still remains unclear. In this study, we investigated the responses of microbial biomass C...

Soil extracellular enzymes play a key role in mediating a range of forest ecosystem functions (i.e., carbon and nutrients cycling and biological productivity), particularly in the face of atmospheric N deposition that has been increasing at an unprecedented rate globally. However, most studies have focused only on surface soils in a single ecosyste...

After decades of research, we are starting to understand more about why the number of species varies from place to place on the planet. However, little is known about spatial variation in abundance, especially for soil-dwelling organisms. In this study, we aimed to disentangle the relative influences of climatic factors, soil properties, and plant...

Previous studies have revealed inconsistent correlations between fungal diversity and plant diversity from local to global scales, and there is a lack of information about the diversity–diversity and productivity–diversity relationships for fungi in alpine regions. � Here we investigated the internal relationships between soil fungal diversity, pla...

[This corrects the article on p. 1032 in vol. 7, PMID: 27446064.].

Based on field observations, remote sensing, and modeling, recent studies have reported inconsistent changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks in grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau over the past few decades. However, direct evidence about the changes in SOC stocks in the plateau's grasslands coming from in situ, site-by-site, repeated surveys is r...

Abstract The biogeographical distribution of soil bacterial communities has been widely investigated. However, there has been little study of the biogeography of soil archaeal communities on a regional scale. Here, using high-throughput sequencing, we characterized the archaeal communities of 94 soil samples across the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Thau...

Based on the warming and altered precipitation experiment platform at Haibei research station, this study investigated the responses of soil inorganic nitrogen to warming and altered precipitation in the growing season in alpine meadow. The results show that 1) warming significantly decreases NH4⁺-N by 47.5% (p=0.001) and NO3⁻-N by 85.4% (p=0.021);...

Soil microbial communities are influenced by climate change drivers such as warming and altered precipitation. These changes create abiotic stresses, including desiccation and nutrient limitation, which act on microbes. However, our understanding of the responses of microbial communities to co-occurring climate change drivers is limited. We surveye...

Plant biodiversity is often correlated with ecosystem functioning in terrestrial ecosystems. However, we know little about the relative and combined effects of above- and belowground biodiversity on multiple ecosystem functions (e.g., ecosystem multifunctionality, EMF) or how climate might mediate those relationships. Here, we tease apart the effec...

As CO2 concentrations continue to rise and drive global climate change, much effort has been put into estimating soil carbon (C) stocks and dynamics over time. However, the inconsistent methods employed by researchers hamper the comparability of such works, creating a pressing need to standardize the methods for soil organic C (SOC) quantification...

Fine roots of woody plants are a heterogeneous system differing markedly in structure and function. Nevertheless, knowledge about the plant uptake of organic pollutants via fine roots is scarce to date. In the present study, plant uptake, translocation, and return of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) via fine roots in a subtropical forest eco...

The Tibetan alpine grasslands, sharing many features with arctic tundra ecosystems, have a unique non-growing-season climate that is usually dry and without persistent snow cover. Pronounced winter warming recently observed in this ecosystem may significantly alter the non-growing-season carbon cycle processes such as soil respiration (Rs), but det...

Alpine grassland soils store large amounts of soil organic carbon (SOC) and are susceptible to rising air temperature. Soil extracellular enzymes catalyze the rate-limiting step in SOC decomposition and their catalysis, production and degradation rates are regulated by temperature. Therefore, the responses of these enzymes to warming could have a p...

Thirty four sampling sites along an elevation transect in the Tibetan Plateau region were chosen. Soil cores were divided into several layers and a total of 175 horizon soil samples were collected from July to September 2011, for determination of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). The measured PAHs concentration in surface soils was 56.26 ± 4...

Background/Question/Methods Climate warming will probably have large impacts on carbon fluxes in high-altitude alpine grassland ecosystems. This is due to the rapid rise in air temperature and the large amounts of stored soil organic carbon. An infrared heater temperature enhancement system has been established since June 2006 in an alpine grassl...