Plant biodiversity responds more strongly to climate warming and anthropogenic activities than microbial biodiversity in the Qinghai-Tibetan alpine grasslands

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 aboveground biodiversity, particularly within alpine regions. However, it remains uncertain whether belowground biodiversity will exhibit similar responses, both in terms of magnitude and manner, to anthropogenic global changes as aboveground biodiversity.
Here, we conducted a meta-analysis to assess the impacts of warming, nutrient addition, and grazing on plant and soil microbial biodiversity in alpine grasslands on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, which are known to be climate-sensitive and vulnerable. The analysis included 819 experimental observations from 152 studies, focusing on species richness, Shannon diversity, and Pielou’s evenness.
We found that plant biodiversity exhibited greater sensitivity to climate warming and anthropogenic activities compared to soil microbial biodi..., We searched the literature for the responses of biodiversity to warming, nutrient addition, and grazing from 1900 to 2022 in the Web of Science and China National Knowledge Infrastructure. The search string is the following key-word combinations:(((tibet*) AND (grassland OR meadow OR steppe) AND (diversity OR richness) AND (plant OR micro* OR bacteria* OR fung*)) AND ((warming OR increasing temperature OR elevated temperature OR climate change) OR (fertiliz* OR nutrient addition OR nitrogen addition OR phosphorus addition) OR (graz* OR livestock grazing))).
We screened studies using the following criteria: (i) based on field manipulative experiments containing control and treatment groups; (ii) contained at least one of the following biodiversity indices: richness (species richness for plants and operational taxonomic unit for soil microbes), Shannon–Wiener diversity index, and Pielou’s evenness index; (iii) included only natural grassland ecosystems, excluding farmland and wetland ecos..., , ## Plant biodiversity responds more strongly to climate warming and anthropogenic activities than microbial biodiversity in the Qinghai-Tibetan alpine grasslands

## Description of the data and file structure

This ReadMe file accompanies the data for the article accepted by the Journal of Ecology.
The data file is named (Supplement_Data.xlsx). The data file contains four sheets: \"ReadMe\", \"Warming\", \"Nutrient addition\", and \"Grazing\".
Abbreviations with simple description as follow, and a full description of these data can be found in sheet \"ReadMe\".

Type: Treatment and aboveground/belowground
Study_ID: Study number
Obs: Observation number
Author: Author of the article
Title: Article title
Pubyear: The year when the article published
Latitude: Latitude of the experimental site
Longitude: Longitude of the experimental site
Altitude: Altitude of the experimental site
MAT: Mean annual temperature
MAP: Mean annual precipitation
Ecotype: Ecosystem type
Warming_method: Warming method
Warmin...