I suggest that the manuscript can be published after some minor corrections. In my opinion, its topic is of interest to its audience of our journal. The experimental design is sound and results are striking.
These findings can improve the understanding of small mammalian herbivores in relation to grassland ecosystem services. This study finds that the presence of plateau pikas and its disturbance intensity have different effect on ecosystem services of alpine meadows when the indicators, which are used to estimate the ecosystem services of alpine meadows, are various. This study uses plateau pika as an example herbivore to investigate the effect of disturbance by small mammalian herbivores and its disturbance intensity on ecosystem services of alpine meadows on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. Small mammalian herbivores often create extensive disturbance on grasslands, and might affect the ecosystem services of grassland ecosystem. These results not only present a possible pattern of plateau pikas influencing the ecosystem services of meadow ecosystem in alpine regions, and consummate the small mammalian herbivores in relation to grassland ecosystem services. This study further found that the forage availability, biodiversity conservation, and soil nutrient maintenance services of meadow ecosystem in alpine regions firstly increased, and later decreased as the disturbance intensity of plateau pikas increased, whereas the water conservation service tended to decrease with the increasing disturbance intensity of plateau pikas. This study showed that plateau pika presence led to lower forage availability and water conservation services, and led to higher biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, soil nitrogen and phosphorus maintenance services of meadow ecosystem, whereas it had no impact on soil potassium maintenance service of meadow ecosystem in alpine regions. In this study, a home-range scale was used measure the forage availability, water conservation, carbon sequestration and soil nutrient maintenance services (total nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) of topsoil layer and a quadrat scale was used to assess the biodiversity conservation service of alpine meadows.
This study took plateau pika ( Ochotona curzoniae) as example animal to investigate the effect of small mammalian herbivores on meadow ecosystem services in alpine regions. The activity of small mammalian herbivores influences grassland ecosystem services in arid and semi-arid regions.
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