Fig. 5
From: Divergent accumulation of microbial necromass and plant lignin components in grassland soils
Cascading relationships of amino sugars and lignin phenols with environmental variables. Best-supported structural equation models disentangling major pathways of environmental influences on the soil organic carbon (SOC)-normalized concentrations of amino sugars (a) and lignin phenols (b) in the Mongolian grasslands with block effect accounted for. Black and red arrows indicate positive and negative flows of causality (p < 0.05), respectively. Gray dotted lines indicate insignificant pathways from a priori models (Supplementary Fig. 5). Numbers on the arrow indicate significant standardized path coefficients, proportional to the arrow width. R2 indicates the variance of biomarkers explained by the model. Environmental variables are categorized into plant, soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N), and soil mineral by a principle component analysis (PCA). Variables in the gray boxes show a positive correlation with the corresponding primary environmental category (Supplementary Table 6). Microbial biomass is represented by phospholipid fatty acids. AGB aboveground biomass, BGB belowground biomass, Fe iron, Al aluminum
