Alpine grassland degradation mediates soil bacterial community assembly processes: a perspective on life-history strategies trade-offs

This study investigated the impact of grassland degradation on plant community structure, soil properties, bacterial communities across five degradation levels (non-degraded, lightly degraded, moderately degraded, severely degraded and extremely degraded) in alpine meadows of the Three Rivers Source Area region on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. Soil sampling was conducted following the plant community survey. At each site, five surface soil samples (0-10 cm) were randomly collected and then combined to form a single composite sample.

Some soil samples were tested for soil physical and chemical properties including soil microbial biomass carbon, microbial biomass nitrogen, urease , invertase and alkaline phosphatase, soil pH, soil organic carbon, soil total nitrogen, soil total phosphorus, soil ammonium nitrogen, soil nitrate nitrogen, soil available phosphorus, and soil moisture content. And high-throughput gene sequencing was performed with the Illumina PE250 sequencing platform (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA).