Figure Legends
Figure 1 Taxonomic relationships of the plants identified by
DNA metabarcoding sequencing of the ITS2 gene in food residues of fecal
samples. (a) Rarefaction curves of OTUs. (b) Venn diagram of shared OTUs
between different samples. (c) PCoA plots based on Binary-Jaccard
metrics between grazing patterns and grazing periods. PC1 is mainly
associated with grazing group (left) or the time-limited grazing group
(right). PC2 is mainly associated with the early grazing (bottom) or
late grazing (top). (d) The heatmap of main plant composition for the
Tan sheep in different grazing patterns.
Figure 2 Information in fecal samples from dietary
metabarcoding data of sheep grazing on desert steppe grassland. (a)
Individual-level data for 24 fecal samples described using different
metrics. Colors indicate different plant taxa. (b) Population-level
summarizes of the data showing the top 20 plant taxa. In both individual
and population data, samples include diet items with
>0.01% sequence reads.
Figure 3 The relative read abundances of major plant groups
consumed by Tan sheep grazing in the desert steppe. Stacked bar charts
show the top 20 plant taxa with 97.96% sequence reads. Colors represent
different food taxa. Grazing types are grazing (G) and time-limited
grazing (LG).
Figure 4 Principal component analysis (PCA) of diet items and
polyunsaturated fatty acid variables in the axis 1 × axis 2 ordination
planes, with all four of the treatments as an overlay (green diamonds
and blue up-triangles).
Figure 5 Redundancy analysis (RDA) of diet items and
polyunsaturated fatty acid variables in the axis 1 × axis 2 ordination
planes constrained by the two grazing treatments. The two treatments
are: grazing (12 h) and time-limited grazing (4 h).
Figure 6 Pearson correlations between each PUFA and herbage
taxa. Abbreviations are as follows: Artemisia sp. (Ar),Corispermum sp. (Co), Phellodendron amurense (Pa),Medicago sativa (Ms), Lespedeza sp. (Le),Chenopodium sp . (Ch), Salsola sp. (Sa), Bassia
scoparia (Bs), Euphorbia humifusa (Eh), Arnebia euchroma(Ae), Ixeris tamagawaensis (It), Oxytropis halleri (Oh).
Figure S1 Fatty acid content in the herbage derived from the
grazing habitat of Tan sheep.