ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Terrestrial Microbiology
This article is part of the Research TopicMicrobe-Environment Interaction Across Grassland Ecosystems: Soil Microbial Diversity, Plant-Microbe Interplay, and Ecosystem FunctionalityView all 13 articles
Topological vulnerability explains fungal and bacterial stability differences in restoration of alpine grasslands
Provisionally accepted
- Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China
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The success of restoring degraded alpine grasslands on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) is intrinsically linked to the recovery of soil microbial communities. However, it is unclear how soil microbial communities reassemble in degraded alpine grasslands during long-term restoration and what key factors drive this process. In this study, we utilized a long-term restoration chronosequence to characterize the successional trajectories of bacterial and fungal communities and the network-level mechanisms driving their reassembly. We confirm that this reassembly process follows a predictable, two-stage trajectory from an early Chaos Stage to a later Recovery Stage. This transition is not merely a shift in species composition, but a fundamental reorganization of the community interaction network. Importantly, we find that while the network of Recovery Stage is stabilized by the emergence of keystone taxa, its integrity becomes extremely dependent on these few nodes. We demonstrate that this topological fragility constitutes the core mechanism underlying the lower stability of fungi relative to bacteria. These insights provide a new framework for understanding microbial succession, suggesting that monitoring network vulnerability, not just its complexity, is a crucial indicator of ecosystem restoration success.
Keywords: community assembly, Co-occurrence network, ecological restoration, keystone taxa, Microbial succession
Received: 14 Dec 2025; Accepted: 30 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Zhao, Lu, Zhang and Dong. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
XiaoYu Zhang
Shikui Dong
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