2026-10-12T07:17:19Z https://www.scidb.cn/oai

10.57760/sciencedb.010qx 2026-09-04T16:58:24Z

2026-09-04 Long-term snow change soil multifunctionality dataset doi:10.57760/sciencedb.010qx en  Winter snowfall is an important water source sustaining the survival and succession of biocrusts in desert ecosystems, yet how different biocrust types respond to altered snow conditions through microbial mechanisms to maintain soil multifunctionality (SMF) remains poorly understood. Based on a field snow-manipulation experiment, we compared the SMF responses of cyanobacterial and lichen crusts under snow removal, ambient snow, and double-snow treatments across different treatment durations and further explored the underlying microbial regulatory mechanisms. Cyanobacterial and lichen crusts exhibited contrasting SMF responses to altered snow conditions. SMF significantly increased in cyanobacterial crusts in the short-term treatment plots (1 year), whereas lichen crusts showed a significant decline only under short-term snow removal. In the medium- and long-term treatment plots (8 and 11 years), differences in SMF between altered-snow and ambient-snow conditions were reduced for both biocrust types. In the short- and medium-term treatment plots, lichen crusts mainly showed increases in bacterial and total microbial diversity, whereas cyanobacterial crusts mainly showed increases in fungal diversity. Microbial life-history strategies showed clear but biocrust-type-specific associations with SMF. Random forest and SEM analyses indicated that cyanobacterial-crust SMF was strongly constrained by the S strategy, although Y-related metabolic pathways were positively associated with SMF, whereas lichen-crust SMF was positively associated with the A strategy but negatively associated with the S strategy. Soil physicochemical properties also played an important role in regulating SMF, but their effects and interactions with microbial attributes differed between the two biocrust types. Overall, this study demonstrates that altered snow conditions regulate biocrust SMF through the coupling of soil environmental changes and microbial functional responses, with the underlying regulatory pathways strongly dependent on biocrust type. snow depth; ecosystem functioning; biocrust succession; microbial diversity; metagenomics zhang qing Yin benfeng Zhang yuanming PUBLIC https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ dataset Science Data Bank