地下鼠生物学特征及其在生态系统中的作用

地下鼠生活型、行为、种群结构的特殊性，决定了此类动物对植被、土壤及生态系统作用的多样性。地下挖能改变土壤的物理环境，导致土壤类型、发育速率、营养可利用性、微地形等的变化。地下啃食直接影响植物的形态、丰富度、种间竞争、植被类型和物种多样性、生物是及群落组成构成等，植物对植食性动物的防御策略具有更明显的化学防卫特性。地下鼠与其他植食性动物种间竞争、空间利用等关系密切，是食肉动物重要的食物资源。地下鼠对生态系统生产力、空间异质性、营养结构和循环、碳素储存以及微量气体释放等生物地球化学过程均能产生影响，显示出有别于地面植食性动物的重要性和不可替代性。

THE BIOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SUBTERRANEAN RODENTS AND THEIR ROLES IN ECOSYSTEM

The modifications of ecosystem structure, function and chemical defense of plant dealing with the underground grazing of subterranean rodents were focused in this paper. Their biological characteristics in different areas were reviewed. The relationships among subterranean rodents, soil, vegetation, and other mammals were discussed and the potential strategies of plant defense and feedback to global change were explored. Subterranean rodents would cause dramatic changes in ecosystem structures and functions because of their particularityin life style, behavior and population structure in nature. With the physical environments of soil being intensively altered by their underground excavating in spacial and temporal scales, the type, development, nutrition availability and microgeography. The underground grazing directly caused many character changes of plants in morphology and life history, leading to the obvious differences such as population abundance, interspecific competition, vegetation, species diversity, biomass and community structure. The strategies of plant defense in community had distinct chemical defense properties. Subterranean rodents were closely connected with other herbivorous mammals in interspecific competition, especially in spatial availability. They were important food resources for other carnivores in food web. In short, the effects of subterranean rodents on the biochemistry process, which contained ecosystem productivity, spatial heterogeneity, nutrition structure and cycling, carbon deposition and trace gas releasing were so intensive that were essential and unsubstitutable in nature.