Intensifying Aridity Undermines the Role of Soil Biodiversity in Supporting Ecosystem Stability
Qi, Jiejun ; Liang, Chunling ; Zhang, Chengwei ; Wang, Min ; Wei, Gehong ; Jiao, Shuo
DOI:10.1111/gcb.70903
Abstract
Biodiversity is widely recognized for enhancing ecosystem stability, yet its contribution is highly sensitive to climate change. However, whether and how climatic factors, particularly aridity, modulate the role of soil biodiversity in stabilizing ecosystems remains poorly understood. Here, we integrated a comprehensive soil survey of 265 dryland agricultural fields along a 3800 km east-west transect in China with a global meta-dataset encompassing 996 sites across six continents. Our analysis revealed a positive association between soil biodiversity and ecosystem stability, quantified using 11-year Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data (2012-2022). Critically, both our field data and global synthesis revealed that increasing aridity significantly weakened this biodiversity-stability relationship. The decline in soil microbial network complexity with increasing aridity partially explains this decoupling. Metagenomic analyses further showed that as aridity increased, microbial life history strategies shifted toward greater investment in stress tolerance at the expense of growth yield and resource acquisition. Together, our findings represent a substantial advance in revealing how intensifying aridity undermines the role of soil biodiversity in supporting ecosystem stability, and highlight the importance of microbial network complexity and life history strategies as key predictors of biodiversity-stability relationships under global change.