Alpine wetlands are highly sensitive to climate warming and anthropogenic disturbances such as grazing, highlighting the urgent need to identify operational indicators for monitoring soil functional changes. In this study, the Zequ National Wetland Park on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau was selected as the study area. At the plot scale (n = 66), vegetation structure (aboveground biomass, vegetation height, and coverage), soil nutrient properties (soil organic carbon (SOC), total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), ammonium nitrogen (NH₄⁺–N), nitrate nitrogen (NO₃⁻–N), available phosphorus (AP)), soil enzyme activities (β-glucosidase (BG), N-acetylglucosaminidase (NAG), and acid phosphatase (ACP)) were measured simultaneously. Spearman correlation analysis and redundancy analysis (RDA) were applied to examine their statistical relationships. Descriptive statistics revealed pronounced variability among plots, with aboveground biomass ranging from 115.43 to 1505.27 g·m⁻², AP from 0.75 to 70.23 mg·kg⁻¹, and BG activity from 0.25 to 14.71 μmol·g⁻¹·h⁻¹, indicating strong spatial heterogeneity in alpine wetlands. Both correlation and RDA results consistently showed that nutrient availability—particularly inorganic nitrogen and AP—was more closely associated with soil enzyme activities, whereas total nutrient contents exhibited a relatively limited ability to explain short-term variations in soil functional processes. These findings suggest that a combined indicator framework integrating nutrient availability and soil enzyme activities has strong potential for the early detection of soil quality changes and degradation in alpine wetlands, thereby providing quantitative support for sustainable wetland management and restoration assessment.

As a typical ecologically degraded mining area, the Jiangcang Mine in Qinghai is characterized by severely depleted soil nutrients and reduced biodiversity, making scientifically grounded soil-amelioration measures urgently necessary to facilitate vegetation reconstruction and enhance soil ecological functions. To determine the optimal fertilization rate, we conducted a two-factor randomized block experiment over an approximately two-year period after plant sowing, using pelletized organic fertilizer and sheep manure as the primary amendments, with three replicates per treatment, and with application rates selected based on commonly used ranges in alpine grassland restoration and the availability of local organic resources in the mining area. Sheep-manure treatments were set at three levels at 0 (S0), 20 (S1), and 40 (S2) kg·m⁻², while pelletized organic fertilizer was applied at three rates at 0.0 (F0), 1.5 (F1), and 3.0 (F2) kg·m⁻². The combination of the two factors resulted in nine treatments: S0F0, S0F1, S0F2, S1F0, S1F1, S1F2, S2F0, S2F1, and S2F2. The results showed that fertilization significantly improved vegetation height, canopy cover, plant density, and aboveground biomass, with the strongest promotive effects observed under S2F2 and S2F1. Compared with other treatments, S2F2 markedly increased soil moisture content, pH, soil organic matter, available nitrogen, available phosphorus, as well as total nitrogen, 6.96-, 2.91-, 1.70-, 5.04-, 2.51-, and 3.91-fold relative to the control, respectively. The S0F2 treatment significantly enhanced bacterial Observed Richness, Shannon, and Chao1 indices, as well as simultaneously increasing fungal Observed Richness and Chao1 index. Vegetation height and density exhibited the strongest positive correlation under S2F1, whereas vegetation cover and aboveground biomass were most strongly correlated under S2F2. A gray relational analysis performed on 15 indicators ranked S2F0 as having the highest relational degree and comprehensive score, followed by S2F2 and S2F1. In summary, the combined application of approximately 40 kg·m⁻² of sheep manure without pelletized organic fertilizer showed the highest comprehensive restoration performance under the experimental conditions of this alpine mining area.

Improving surface-soil carbon accumulation is important for restoring reclaimed alpine mining soils. We evaluated nine treatments in the Muli mining area, Qinghai, China: a control (CK) and eight sheep manure cake rates (0.025–0.060 m³·m⁻²). Soil total organic carbon (TOC), particulate organic carbon (POC), microbial biomass carbon (MBC), dissolved organic carbon (DOC), 0–10 cm soil organic carbon (SOC) stock, carbon pool management index (CPMI), carbon fixation genes (cbbL and cbbM), and microbial community sequencing profiles were assessed. Sheep manure cake significantly increased the measured carbon fractions and CPMI. The 0–10 cm SOC stock was highest under SM3 (75.82 ± 3.52 Mg C ha⁻¹), followed by SM4 (65.99 ± 3.49 Mg C ha⁻¹), compared with 20.74 ± 1.52 Mg C ha⁻¹ in CK. cbbL and cbbM gene copy numbers peaked under SM2 (0.030 m³·m⁻²), reaching 1.51 × 10⁹ and 1.91 × 10⁷ copies·g⁻¹, respectively. Under the prespecified equal criterion-layer weights, TOPSIS ranked SM2 first; however, sensitivity analysis showed that the leading treatment changed when criterion weights were altered. Thus, SM3–SM4 showed the strongest measured surface-carbon accumulation, whereas SM2 was the highest-ranked treatment only within the adopted TOPSIS weighting scheme.