Global climate change has markedly intensified environmental heterogeneity across plateau ecosystems, thereby imposing stronger environmental stresses on the structure and function of plant communities. Alpine herbaceous plant communities, as a climate-sensitive component, can rapidly reflect ecosystem responses to external environmental fluctuations. Their resource-use strategies, interspecific interactions, and mechanisms maintaining community stability are fundamental to understanding the adaptive processes of alpine ecosystems. Therefore, we selected the alpine desert of northwestern Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, China as the study area and conducted vegetation surveys from June to August 2024, encompassing 7 counties, 173 plots, and 519 quadrats. We analyzed patterns of niche overlap and differentiation, interspecific association types, and assessed the current state of community stability under extremely cold and arid conditions. The results revealed significant differentiation in niche breadth among dominant species, with Stipa purpurea Griseb identified as a broad-niche dominant species, whereas species such as Kobresia pygmaea (C. B. Clarke) C. B. Clarke exhibited narrow-niche specialization strategies. The mean community niche overlap index was 0.06, and the mean niche similarity index was 0.03, indicating a high degree of resource-use differentiation among species. Interspecific associations were predominantly weakly positive, and the community as a whole exhibited a significantly positive network structure, with a significant positive:negative associations ratio of 2.2:1.0. This pattern indicated that a community structure was dominated by facilitative interactions with markedly weakened competitive interactions. The intersection point in the stability model suggests that the system is currently in a stable state, characterized by low niche overlap, low similarity, and overall positive associations. Considering the high sensitivity of alpine desert ecosystems on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau to climate change and anthropogenic disturbance, we recommend prioritizing the introduction of broad-niche dominant species such as S. purpurea to enhance resource-use diversity and structural resilience, thereby proactively strengthening the ecosystem's resistance to disturbance while maintaining its existing stability. These findings provide a scientific basis for elucidating the adaptive strategies of alpine desert ecosystems to climate change and for optimizing ecological conservation and restoration frameworks.
Fu et al. (2026) studied this question.