Plant functional traits affect the extent to which denitrification is enhanced by wetland plants through both direct and indirect pathways. Through constructing a structural equation model, our trait-based perspective helps reveal the pathways underlying denitrification and inspires new practices in ecological engineering and ecological management.

Increasing soil bulk density and water stress drove plants to adopt broader trait combinations, enhancing stress tolerance and physiological plasticity during dune stabilization.

By examining Spartina alterniflora across latitudinal gradients in China, this study reveals that a genetically based negative covariance between clonal emergence timing and ramet production facilitates its local adaptation at low latitudes. These findings advance our understanding of invasive life-history strategies and inform region-specific, phenology-driven management.

This study demonstrates the function of phyllosphere microorganisms, the initial colonizers of litter, in the process of litter decomposition, confirming that they can directly participate in decomposition and form functional complementarities with the soil microbiome, jointly promoting the decomposition process. This unique microbiome interaction model provides new insights into the microbial regulatory mechanisms of forest litter decomposition and nutrient cycling.

This study reveals that tree diversity enhances crown complementarity and canopy packing through increased variation in architectural traits, and highlights that diversity-driven variation in crown architectural traits provides a key mechanistic pathway linking tree diversity to canopy processes in early-stage experimental forests.

Root foraging is a common response of plants to heterogeneous soils. We found at the first time that interspecific competition on a ramet of clonal plants can promote root foraging of its interconnected ramet growing in heterogeneous soils.

This study found that drought significantly inhibited plant residue decomposition from different species and organs on the Loess Plateau, with stronger effects under more severe drought. Systematic differences between gymnosperms (Pinus tabuliformis) and angiosperms (Robinia pseudoacacia) were mainly driven by interspecific variations in plant residue traits and their associated microbial communities, which modulated the moisture sensitivity of decomposition, providing key mechanistic insights for predicting arid land carbon cycling under future drought intensification.

Compound droughts caused by concurrent atmospheric and soil moisture deficits exert stronger negative effects on vegetation productivity. From 1982 to 2018, droughts in China intensified and were negatively associated with vegetation productivity, with compound droughts dominating GPP decline and showing an approximately one-month lag.

Global nitrogen inputs significantly alter the carbon-to-nitrogen stoichiometric ratio in wetland plant stems, thereby driving enhanced productivity in wetland ecosystems. This core mechanism explains 56.3% and 31.0% of the variation in belowground and aboveground productivity, respectively, providing crucial evidence for modeling predictions of wetland carbon and nitrogen cycles in response to global change.

This study examined symbiotic and free-living N2(2 subscript) fixation in a legume-cereal intercropping system. Silage maize/Chinese milk vetch intercropping reduced total symbiotic nitrogen input but enhanced silage maize nitrogen-use efficiency and system productivity by driving species-specific reallocation of free-living fixed nitrogen in the rhizosphere.

The study elucidated the plant community assembly process during the early stage of vegetation restoration in severely degraded alpine meadows on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. It revealed that following mixed sowing, the plant communities were influenced by the counterbalancing effects of environmental filtering and niche differentiation, which consequently led to a stochastic assembly pattern in the early restoration phase.

The influence of human footprint on plant range filling differs fundamentally between mycorrhizal types. Specifically, for arbuscular mycorrhizal plants, human footprint constrains narrow-ranged species but enhances widespread ones. Conversely, the range filling of ectomycorrhizal plant is primarily determined by the abiotic environment.

Facing the altered water and nitrogen regimes in wetlands due to climate change and agricultural activities, current research still lacks an in-depth understanding of their interactive effects. There is an urgent need to clarify how wetland plants coordinate their morphological, physiological, and resource-use strategies under water-nitrogen interactions.

This study reveals that the invasive plant Ageratina adenophora enhances its growth by selectively recruiting beneficial microbes from native plants, particularly above-ground microorganisms, highlighting the role of plant-microbe interactions in biological invasion.

Based on observations from the spaceborne LiDAR (GEDI), this study demonstrates that tree plantations in China exhibit lower values than natural forests in four 3D structural attributes, including canopy height, plant area index, foliage height diversity, and canopy cover, highlighting the importance of prioritizing forest restoration in favorable environment conditions and adopting close-to-nature restoration approaches to enhance forest structure and better support ecosystem services.

Currently, most studies on plant functional traits in karst regions have focused only on leaf traits of a few dominant species, leaving a significant data gap. This study provides ten morphological traits from 3661 individuals of 152 species across 90 genera and 65 families. All individuals had a diameter at breast height ≥1 cm and were sampled from twelve primary forest plots in the Maolan National Nature Reserve, southwestern China.

Although leaf N:P is widely used to diagnose plant nutrient limitation, its physiological basis remains unclear. Different P fractions in leaves perform distinct physiological functions. By quantifying changes in leaf P fractions with N:P, this study reveals complex coordination and trade-off in leaf P-use strategies and provides a physiological explanation for using leaf N:P as a nutritional diagnostic indicator.

Interannual rainfall interacted with species' mycorrhizal strategies to shape demographic outcomes, underscoring the pivotal role of mycorrhizal types in determining seedling dynamics.

Atmospheric aerosols can influence tree growth by modifying radiation regimes and microclimate, with their effects primarily regulated by cloud cover, canopy structure, and tree species. This study elucidates the roles of these biotic and abiotic factors in modulating aerosol-related growth responses, providing key empirical evidence for the accurate assessment of aerosol impacts on forest carbon sinks.

Forest structure drives the changes in the community structure and functional traits of lianas during secondary succession in a temperate oak forest. The study found that the abundance and wood density of lianas decreased with forest succession, and these changes were closely related to the reduction in tree diversity and the increase in canopy cover, tree DBH, and tree height during succession. The findings not only reveal the importance of forest structure in regulating liana community assembly, but also highlight the importance of stem traits in understanding the ecological strategies of lianas.

Our study reveals that the leaf economics spectrum facilitates soil nitrification via cascading effects on litter N content, soil ammonium availability, and ammonia-oxidizing archaea abundance, and establishes a leaf trait-based framework for linking tree species to ecological processes.

This study demonstrates that biocrust succession regulates plant biomass through bacteria-mediated pathways affecting soil moisture, nutrient availability, phyllosphere microbiota, and plant traits, revealing a trade-off mechanism between autumn- and spring-germinating ephemerals in desert ecosystems.

Exogenous inoculant Bacillus thuringiensis NL-11 enriches specific indigenous rhizosphere taxa and enables the rational assembly of synthetic communities. A colonization-guided, simplified two-member consortium (SynComC; NJ158 and NJ63), especially when co-inoculated with NL-11, delivers superior plant growth promotion and higher co-occurrence network stability, highlighting an effective “exogenous strain + native partners” design principle.