Rainfall amount determines annual herb controls over soil seed bank and its similarity with vegetation in the Tengger Desert

Ecological Processes

Table 2 Ordination distances within the aboveground vegetation, the soil seed bank and between the two groups for different life form species based on the first two axes of the two-dimensional non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) ordination in Fig. 3

Life forms	The ordination distances (Mean ± Se)
Life forms	within the aboveground vegetation (n = 6)	within the soil seed bank (n = 6)	between the two groups (n = 16)
All	0.861 ± 0.112^b	0.330 ± 0.065^c	1.428 ± 0.299^a
Shrub	0.176 ± 0.036^ab	0.041 ± 0.025^b	0.231 ± 0.027^a
Perennial herbs	0.649 ± 0.065^b	0.206 ± 0.017^c	1.941 ± 0.072^a
Annual herbs	0.397 ± 0.092^a	0.279 ± 0.072^a	0.261 ± 0.047^a

Within each row, different letters represent significant differences within the soil seed bank, the aboveground vegetation and between the two groups for different life form species according to a post-hoc HSD tests at p < 0.05 level