Abstract Mowing affects soil nitrogen content and microbial characteristics by altering vegetation growth in grasslands. However, whether such impacts of mowing are modulated by vegetation restoration, such as legume reseeding, remains unclear. Through a two-factor interaction field experiment involving mowing and alfalfa reseeding, we investigated vegetation biomass, soil nitrogen content, bacterial community characteristics and soil enzyme activities. Alfalfa reseeding significantly increases aboveground biomass and nitrogen stock and mitigates the negative impacts of mowing on aboveground biomass. Mowing significantly affected the soil nitrogen content in the two soil layers under the non-reseeding treatment, whereas no significant effect was observed under the reseeding treatment. The same result was observed for bacterial alpha diversity in the 0–10 cm soil layer. Reseeding significantly increased soil neutral protease activity. Correlation analysis revealed that the abundance of Alphaproteobacteria and Gammaproteobacteria was positively correlated with neutral protease activity. Reseeding significantly increased bacterial alpha diversity in the 0–10 cm soil layer and altered beta diversity and community composition. The results of redundancy analysis (RDA) indicated that the bacterial community composition was positively correlated with vegetation biomass. Notably, reseeding modified the relationships among soil bacterial diversity, vegetation biomass and soil nitrogen status after mowing. Reseeding regulated the responses of vegetation, soil nitrogen properties, bacterial communities, and enzyme activities to mowing in degraded grasslands. Our study confirms that short-term reseeding regulates the effects of mowing on vegetation biomass, soil nitrogen, and bacterial community diversity in natural grasslands, and alters the relationships among vegetation, soil nitrogen, and bacteria. These findings provide insights into the short-term impacts of the interaction between reseeding and mowing on natural grasslands.
Zuo et al. (Wed,) studied this question.