Data from: Cross-scale effects of habitat fragmentation on local biodiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality in a fragmented grassland landscape

Anthropogenic habitat fragmentation has become the main threat to
terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. However, the impacts of habitat
fragmentation at different spatial scales on biodiversity and ecosystem
functions remain uncertain. Based on 130 fragmented grassland landscapes
in the agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China, we investigated the
hierarchical effects of habitat fragmentation at landscape and patch
scales on plant, soil bacteria, and soil fungi diversity and ecosystem
multifunctionality in local sample sites. We found that increased
inter-patch distance within the landscape had the strongest negative
effect on plant richness. Decreased habitat amount within the landscape
had the strongest negative effect on bacteria richness, fungi richness,
and 80% threshold multifunctionality. Decreased patch area and increased
patch isolation had the strongest negative effects on 30% and 50%
threshold multifunctionality, respectively. Importantly, we found that
patch-scale fragmentation mediated the negative effects of landscape-scale
fragmentation on biodiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality. And
biodiversity had no significant effect on ecosystem multifunctionality.
Synthesis. Our study highlights that both landscape-scale and patch-scale
fragmentation decline biodiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality in the
agro-pastoral ecotone in northern China, with a significant spatial
hierarchical structure. Biodiversity poorly predicts ecosystem
multifunctionality in the fragmented grassland landscape.