Fig. 3: Overview of generalized changes in microbial community composition and functioning along the degradation sequence from intact (S0) to severely degraded (S5) stage.
From: Microbial functional changes mark irreversible course of Tibetan grassland degradation
Generalized changes in microbial community composition and enzyme activities (A). Simplified non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) plots derived from terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (t-RFLP) data for the bacterial (B) and fungal (C) communities. Shaded areas mark each degradation stage, symbols indicate soil depth, and arrows show most important driving factors (canonical correspondence analysis, p < 0.05). Individual variables underlying the processes described by the blue and red arrows are shown in Supplementary Fig. 6.
