Study sites
The transect study was conducted across a 3200-km scale of northern
China’s grasslands (Wang et al. 2017), extending from the
Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the west to eastern Inner Mongolia
(83.45° E to 120.36° E, 42.89° N to 49.19° N; Fig. 1). There are four
vegetation types along this transect, including alpine-, desert-,
typical- and meadow-steppe from west to east. Information on dominant
species observed at each study site is supplied in Supplementary Dataset
1. Species richness decreased when moving from the eastern to the
western end of the transect. Dominant soil types are classified as
aeolian chestnut soil in the east to brown calcic soil, grey desert soil
and sandy soil to the west.