Abstract: Forest-grassland ecotone is a cline of plant communities between forest and grassland. This ecotone is characterized by diverse landscape types, strong environmental heterogeneity, and evident edge effects. Forest-grassland ecotone is sensitive to global climate change, and serves as critical zones of biodiversity conservation. Because of its special habitat, above and belowground biodiversity and ecological linkages of the forest-grassland ecotone is far more complicated than other ecosystems, such as forests, grasslands and farmlands. Here, we reviewed the effects of topographic factors, nutrient cycling of ecosystems, global changes, and anthropogenic disturbances on plant diversity in forest-grassland ecotone. We also discussed the effects of land use types, nitrogen deposition, atmospheric CO₂ enrichment, litterfall, soil organic matter content, and soil depth on soil microbial diversity. Future studies should focus on research approaches that combine manipulative experiments of local scale with observations crossing environmental gradients, so as to reveal the geographical pattern and ecological mechanism of biodiversity formation in forest-grassland ecotone. Specifically, this includes how biodiversity responds to soil acidification, fire, litter composition, enclosure and grazing, and interactions of multi-factors as well as ecological linkages between above- and belowground biodiversity and degraded habitat restoration and vegetation recovery. This would provide theoretical guidance and data reference for land use and biodiversity conservation in the forest-grassland ecotone.

Key words: ecotone, plant community, soil microorganism, topographic factor, global change, litterfall, nutrient cycling