The primary ecological features in Mu Us Sandland are the sand substrate and the resulting high habitat heterogeneity. Clonal plants,leveraging their clonal characteristics,successfully adapt to highly heterogeneous habitats and consistently play a significant role in the local plant community. Clonal plant can redistribute resources including water and nutrient in horizontal space,and these redistributed resources can also be used by its neighbors. Leymus secalinus,a rhizomatous clonal plant,is one of the dominant plant species in Mu Us Sandyland,which clone fragments usually occupy a larger area and across different habits. Through clonal integration,L. secalinus can transfer resources from the resources-rich habitat patches to the resources-poor habitat patches,which may promote the growth of its neighbors,and then affect the structure and function of the entire plant community. But there is still little direct experimental evidence. This study conducted a controlled field experiment to determine the influence of L. secalinus on plant community structure and function under treatments of water addition and rhizome severing. Twenty-four quadrat pairs,consisted of a treated quadrat and an adjacent connected quadrat,were set up in the plant community of L. secalinus as the dominant species,and all treated quadrats were assigned to one of four treatments in a factorial design with water addition (water addition,control) and rhizome severing (severing,connecting) in this study. We tested the hypothesized that the rhizomatous clonal plant L. secalinus may have an impact on the growth of its neighboring plants,which in turn may have an impact on the composition and functionality of the plant community,based on mechanisms related to resources redistribution. Our findings demonstrated that the addition of water significantly increased aboveground biomass of other plants in the treated quadrat as well as that in the connected quadrat,as well as the total aboveground biomass of plants in the connected quadrat,without cutting off the rhizomes which connect the ramets of L. chinensis in the two adjacent quadrats. Nonetheless,when these rhizomes were severed,water addition enhanced aboveground biomass in the treated quadrat but did not significantly affect biomass or its distribution in the connected quadrat. These results confirmed our hypotheses,that plant clonality has a direct impact on the structure and function of plant communities. As a result,clonal plants may be crucial to vegetation restoration and stability maintenance in Mu Us Sandland. Future research should focus on how plant clonality influences resource reallocation mechanisms and the ecological impacts of plant clonality on plant communities and ecosystems.