Results Change of α, β and γ diversity of plant community Change of α diversity of plant community The results of two-way ANOVA (Table 2 ) showed that grazing intensity did not significant influence α diversity ( P > 0.05), whereas grassland type had a highly significant effect on α diversity ( P < 0.01), and the interaction between grazing intensity and grassland type significantly affected α diversity ( P < 0.05).
During the transition from typical steppes to desert steppes, β diversity in desert steppes showed a decreasing trend with an increase in grazing intensity (Fig. 4 B).
The α diversity of meadow steppes showed a trend of first increasing and then decreasing with the increase of grazing intensity; the pattern of change of typical steppes α diversity was not obvious; the α diversity of desert steppes continued to decrease with the increase of grazing intensity (Fig. 1 C), and this process of change resulted in insignificant differences in α diversity under grazing intensity (Fig. 1 A).