Grapes, an important and widespread fruit crop providing multiple products, face increasing flooding risks due to intense and frequent extreme rainfall. It is thus imperative to fully understand the flood-tolerance mechanisms of grapevines. Here, RNA-seq and LC-MS/MS technologies were used to analyze the transcriptome and metabolome changes in the roots of SO4 (tolerant to flooding) and Kyoho (sensitive to flooding) grapes under flooding and post-flooding conditions. The results showed that the abundance of many metabolites in the phenylpropanoids and polyketides, organic acids and their derivatives, and organic oxygen compounds superclasses changed in different patterns between the Kyoho and SO4 grapes under flooding and post-flooding conditions. Jasmonic acid and the ascorbic acid–glutathione cycle played a pivotal role in coping with both hypoxia stress and reoxygenation stress incurred during flooding and post-flooding treatments in the SO4 cultivar. Under flooding stress, the regulatory mechanistic shift from aerobic respiration to anaerobic fermentation under hypoxia is partly missing in the Kyoho cultivar. In the post-flooding stage, many genes related to ethylene, gibberellins, cytokinins, and brassinosteroids biosynthesis and brassinosteroids-responsive genes were significantly downregulated in the Kyoho cultivar, adversely affecting growth recovery; however, their expression was not reduced in the SO4 cultivar. These findings enhance our understanding of the flooding-tolerance mechanisms in grapes.

The effects of snow regimes (including the depth and duration of snow cover) on soil N dynamics and microbial activity in situ were explored in the alpine belt of the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Deeper snow-cover reduced NH ₄ ⁺ -N content, microbial biomass carbon and nitrogen, fungi count, and enzyme activities, whereas did not change net N mineralization. No differences in N pools in the soil, microbial biomass, microbial counts, and enzyme activity were found under the different duration of snow cover, showing that accumulation and release in soil N pools did not be significantly changed by earlier continuous snow cover.

Fire is important in boreal forest ecosystems, but comprehensive recovery analysis is lacking for soil nutrients and plant traits in China boreal forests, where the strict “extinguish at sight” fire prevention policy has been implemented. Based on over 50 years of forest fire recordings in the Daxing’anling Mts, 48 pairs of burnt and unburnt controls (1066 plots) were selected for 0–20 cm soil sampling and plant surveys. We recorded 18 plant parameters of the abundance of each tree, shrub, grass, and plant size (height, diameter, and coverage), 7 geo-topographic data parameters, and 2 fire traits (recovery year and burnt area). We measured eight soil properties (soil organic carbon, SOC; total nitrogen, TN; total phosphorus, TP; alkali-hydrolyzed P, AP; organic P, Po; inorganic P, Pi; total glomalin-related soil protein, T-GRSP; easily-extracted GRSP, EE-GRSP). Paired T-tests revealed that the most significant impact of the fire was a 25%–48% reduction in tree sizes, followed by decline in the plant diversity of arbors and shrubs but increasing plant diversity in herbs. GRSP showed an >18% increase and P_o decreased by 17% (p < 0.05). Redundancy ordination showed that the post-fire recovery years and burnt area were the most potent explainer for the variations (p < 0.05), strongly interacting with latitudes and longitudes. Plant richness and tree size were directly affected by fire traits, while the burnt area and recovery times indirectly increased the GRSP via plant richness. A fire/control ratio chronosequence found that forest community traits (tree size and diversity) and soil nutrients could be recovered to the control level after ca. 30 years. This was relatively shorter than in reports on other boreal forests. The possible reasons are the low forest quality from overharvesting in history and the low fire severity from China’s fire prevention policy. This policy reduced the human mistake-related fire incidence to 10 cm/year. Our finding supports forest management and the evaluation of forest succession after wildfires from a holistic view of plant–soil interactions.