Grazing intensity affected spatial patterns of vegetation and soil fertility in a desert steppe

Spatial heterogeneities of vegetation and soil can strongly affect ecological functions of ecosystems, particularly for arid and semi-arid ecosystems where vegetation has a patchy distribution and livestock grazing is one of the major land use types. However, little is known about the impact of grazing on spatial patterns of vegetation and soil, even though grazing has variously been shown to create, maintain or destroy those patterns. We studied how grazing intensity affected the spatial patterns of vegetation and soil fertility at scales ranging from 0.1 to 18.7m in a desert steppe in Inner Mongolia, China. Increasing grazing intensity decreased the range of spatial autocorrelation of plant aboveground biomass at the fine scale (