Core microbes regulate plant-soil resilience by maintaining network resilience during long-term restoration of alpine grasslands

The alpine grasslands of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP), the world’s highest plateau, have been severely degraded. To address this degradation, human-involved restoration efforts, including grassland cultivation, have been implemented. However, the impact of these practices on soil microbial community stability and its relationship with plant-soil system resilience has not been explored. In this study, we evaluate the effects of grassland restoration on microbial communities. We show that bacteria demonstrate higher composition resistance and resilience during the restoration process, when compared to fungi. The changes we observe in microbial community interactions support the stress gradient hypothesis. Our results emphasize the synergistic role of network resilience and the restoration of the plant-soil system. Importantly, we find that core microbial species significantly influence the resilience of the plant-soil system by sustaining the co-occurrence networks. These insights underscore the critical roles of microbial communities in grassland restoration and suggest new strategies for boosting grassland resilience by safeguarding core microbes.