Mountain biodiversity and ecosystem functions: Interplay between geology and contemporary environments

Although biodiversity and ecosystem functions are strongly shaped by contemporary environments such as climate and local biotic and abiotic attributes, relatively little is known about how they depend on long-term geological processes. Here, along a 3000-m elevational gradient with tectonic faults on the Tibetan Plateau, we studied the joint effects of geological and contemporary environments on biological communities, such as the diversity and community composition of plants and soil bacteria, and ecosystem functions. We found that these biological communities and ecosystem functions generally show consistent elevational breakpoints at 2000–2800 m, which coincide with Indus-Yalu suture zone fault and are similar to the elevational breakpoints of soil bacteria on another mountain range 1000 km away. Mean annual temperature, soil pH and moisture were the primary contemporary determinants of biodiversity and ecosystem functions, which supports previous findings. However, compared to the m...