Divergent stability architectures of soil methanogens and methanotrophs are associated with methane fluxes in alpine wetlands

Soil methanogens and methanotrophs jointly regulate methane (CH 4 ) cycling, yet how they maintain stability under environmental changes and thereby affect CH 4 emissions remains poorly understood. Integrating a large-scale survey of 31 Qinghai-Tibet Plateau alpine wetlands with amplicon sequencing and microcosm incubation, we quantify the multidimensional stability architecture of these CH 4 -cycling guilds, spanning taxonomic diversity, community structure, and component abundance. While diversity stability is comparable between guilds, methanogens exhibit significantly lower structural and component stability than methanotrophs. Underpinning this divergence, methanogens show a flexible insurance strategy shaped by compensatory dynamics and deterministic assembly, while methanotrophs display a strategy of rigid tolerance via robust networks, broad niche widths, and weak environmental filtering. Furthermore, the environmental drivers of stability architecture are decoupled between the two guilds. Critically, component stability shows stronger associations with CH 4 fluxes than the traditional Shannon diversity for both guilds, while the direction and strength of the diversity-CH 4 flux relationship vary across stability architectures. These findings highlight the importance of integrating microbial stability architecture to predict ecosystem functioning under global change.