Coupling between plant nitrogen and phosphorus along water and heat gradients in alpine grassland

Abstract The biogeochemical cycles of plant nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) are interlinked by ecological processes, and the N and P cycles become uncoupled in response to global change experiments. However, the complex natural hydrothermal conditions in arid, semiarid and humid grassland ecosystems may have different effects on the availability of soil nutrients and moisture and may induce different balances between the N and P cycles. Here, we evaluated how the aridity index (AI) affects the balance between N and P of alpine grassland by the collected 115 sites along water and heat availability gradients on the Tibetan Plateau. We found that AI was negatively related to the variation in the coefficients of soil total dissolved N (TDN) and soil availability of P (SAP), and positive effects of AI, TDN and SAP on the coupling of plant N and P were detected. Thus, AI was positively correlated with soil nutrients and moisture, which may favor the co-uptake of soil nutrients by plants, resulting in a small variation in plant N and P in humid environments. Conversely, in arid environments with temporally variable soil nutrients, the plants tend to be more flexible in their N:P stoichiometry. Generally, our findings suggest that plant N and P could be more strongly coupled in humid conditions than in arid environments across alpine grasslands, with potential decoupling of the N biogeochemical cycle from P in an arid environment with an asynchronous dynamic of temperature and precipitation.