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.