Different grazing practices can have varying impacts on soil properties and soil microbial communities, which are critical for maintaining productivity and functions of grasslands and the overall ecosystem. The Qinghai-Tibetan plateau (QTP) is the largest high-altitude grazing region on earth, and has three different grazing practices, including seasonal grazing (SG), continuous grazing (CG), and exclosure grazing (EG) for 10 years. Vegetation, soil properties from two different depths (0-0.15 and 0.15-0.30 m) and soil microbial communitiesin the surface soil layer (0-0.15 m) were measured in triplicate plots within each grazing practice. The soil conditions in the SG site were the best, the CG site was the worst, while the EG site was intermediate. Dry aboveground biomass, soil organic carbon, total nitrogen, and total phosphorus content under SG were 838 g/m2, 20.73g/kg, 1.74 g/kg, and 0.20 g/kg, respectively, and under CG were 8.80 g/m2, 8.07g/kg, 1.07 g/kg, 0.16 g/kg, respectively. There was no significant difference in the α-diversity of soil bacteria and fungi among the three grazing practices. However, the bacterial communities were significantly different from each other; only the fungal community under EG was significantly different from the other grazing practices. While the relative abundance of Basidiomycota under SG was significantly higher than that under EG, no difference was observed in the relative abundance of Ascomycota, Zygomycota, and unclassified_k_Fungi among the three grazing practices. Compared to SG, CG and EG significantly increased the relative abundance of Actinobacteria, Gemmatimonadetes, Verrucomicrobia, and Nitrospirae, but decreased the relative abundance of Proteobacteria and Bacteroidetes.

Correct modelling of relationships between predators and prey is crucial to ecological and population dynamics models. However, and despite a long-standing competition between ratio and prey-dependent models (and a few alternative intermediate forms) in the literature, most equations currently used to represent such relationships do not meet theoretical criteria for biological consistency. This research proposes a set of universally applicable criteria for all predation equations and shows that the most commonly used predation equations in the literature fail to meet these same criteria. We follow with a proposal for a new predation equation that does meet these criteria, which combines both prey and ratio-dependent concepts while giving reasonable predictions in the cases of both high predator or high prey densities. We show its empirical performance by applying the new equation, along with existing alternatives, to various experimental predation datasets from the literature. Results show that the new equation is not only more mathematically consistent than existing equations, but also performs more consistently empirically across different datasets from various ecological situations. This research is the first to propose a systematic set of criteria to evaluate predation equations and then to offer an equation that meets these criteria and also performs well both theoretically and empirically across datasets from a wide range of predation systems.