24th Pacific Science Congress (PSC-24)

The Qinghai-Xizang Plateau (QXP), known as the “Third Pole” of the Earth, plays an irreplaceable role in global biodiversity conservation, climate regulation, and water cycle maintenance. Its ecosystems are not only the foundation for sustaining local livelihoods and pastoral economies but also act as a sensitive indicator of global climate change. Ecosystem stability, a core ecological metric, refers to an ecosystem’s ability to maintain or recover its key structure and functions under natural or anthropogenic disturbances. It is inherently multidimensional, encompassing temporal stability (constancy of productivity over time), resistance (ability to withstand disturbances), resilience (rate of recovery post-disturbance), and dimensionality (associations among these stability components). Recent decades have witnessed a surge in studies on ecosystem stability across the QXP, with research approaches broadly falling into two categories, each yielding critical insights.  Firstly, a large-scale assessment of stability dynamics has been achieved based on remote sensing analysis, especially the systematic characterization of the ecosystem stability spatial pattern of typical alpine ecosystems. Large-scale studies have effectively characterized spatial patterns of stability but lack the ability to capture biotic mechanisms (species asynchrony or functional trait effects) that underpin stability. Second, field experimental studies have focused on mainly focused on the temporal stability of ecosystem functions, usually manifested as the unchanged changes in aboveground biomass or productivity over time. Field experiments have revealed mechanisms linking biotic factors to functional stability but cannot extrapolate these findings to regional scales, failing to reflect large-scale spatial heterogeneity. Overall, remote sensing data enable the quantification of long-term, regional-scale stability patterns that are unachievable with field surveys alone and field surveys validate uncover biotic mechanisms that remote sensing cannot capture. Combining large-scale remote sensing assessments with detailed field investigations is crucial, as it is a unique and underutilized method that links spatial patterns with ecological processes.

resistance,Qinghai-Xizang Plateau,ecosystem stability