4.3 Individual species
Soil available nutrient enrichment can benefit the competitive ability of perennial grasses over other plant species (DeMalach & Kadmon, 2017). However, our results indicate that, in the normal year (2019), N and/or P input effectively enhanced the aboveground biomass of C. aristatum than other dominant species. C. aristatum is generally viewed as a non-mycorrhizal plant in grassland ecosystems (H. Tian et al., 2009). Besieds, a meta-analysis also found that annual plant species were more able to rapidly absorb water and nutrients compared with other plant species (Lin, McCormack, & Guo, 2015). C. aristatum has a shallow root system and can efficiently utilise resource that are distributed in the upper layers of soils, especially in arid grassland ecosystems (Yan et al., 2015). These characteristics may be attributed to the pronounced impacts of both N and P inputs on the aboveground biomass of C. aristatum in 2019.