Abstract
Soil mites (Acari) are ubiquitous in soil ecosystems and show a vast taxonomic diversity with a wide range of life history characteristics and feeding strategies. Various taxa contribute directly or indirectly to soil processes, including nutrient cycling, soil formation and pest control. Mites thus support important ecosystem services of soils. Yet, their community composition, and therewith service provisioning, may differ between for instance intensively managed agricultural soils and extensively managed grassland soils. We therefore hypothesized that successional changes in the abundance and diversity of soil mite functional groups (feeding types) will occur following a conversion of arable land to grassland, affecting their contribution to ecosystem services. To test this, we studied the succession of mite communities on two Long Term Observatories (LTOs) in Lusignan (France) and Veluwe (the Netherlands). At Lusignan, sampling involved four combinations of recent and historic land use types. At the Veluwe, samples were taken in a secondary succession chronosequence in grasslands, representing a time frame up to 29 years after the conversion from arable land to grassland. Biodiversity and biomass were higher in grassland than in arable land, especially for the total mite community, the predators and the main taxa aiding in decomposition. After conversion of grassland to arable land, or vice versa, both taxon richness and biomass rapidly developed towards the prevailing conditions. Our results indicated that the taxon richness and biomass of the total mite community in grassland still continued to increase up to 29 years after the conversion from arable land to grassland. Total taxon richness increased with time since conversion, which was mainly due to the immigration of decomposers and predators. The biomass of different feeding guilds increased at variable speeds. The observed changes imply an increase in nutrient cycling and in the suppression of some potential pests. We discuss the relevance of these ecosystem services in extensively managed grasslands and agricultural systems. Furthermore, our results suggest that in agricultural rotational schemes that include one or more years of grassland, mite communities and associated ecosystem services may be partially, but not completely, restored to the conditions of long term grassland.
Highlights
The average soil contains a huge taxonomic diversity of bacteria, protozoa, fungi, nematodes, enchytraeids, insect larvae, and earthworms
In three periods between 1996–2000, 2001–2004, and 2005–2011 the fields were cultivated in the following way: 1. permanent arable fields (AAA), 2. arable lands converted to grassland 7 years before sampling (AAG), 3. grasslands that were converted to arable land for 4 years, after which they were converted again to grassland 7 years before sampling (GAG), and 4
Because we were mainly interested in the development of the mite community following a transition from arable land to grassland, and to reduce the number of pairwise comparisons, we focused on the differences between the fields that were converted to grassland but had different historic land use up to 11 years before our sampling event (AAG and grassland years before sampling (GAG); see Section Site Description for exact code descriptions), and the difference between each of those and the permanent arable fields (AAG–AAA and GAG–AAA)
Summary
The average soil contains a huge taxonomic diversity of bacteria, protozoa, fungi, nematodes, enchytraeids, insect larvae, and earthworms. Viewing the process of ecosystem engineering as any physical transformation in the environment that modifies the resources for other organisms (Jones et al, 1994), soil invertebrates mediate soil functioning through a wide range of engineering processes Examples of such processes are the redistribution of organic matter, bioturbation, the comminution, and incorporation of litter into soil, contributions to structural porosity and the formation of soil aggregates through burrowing, casting and nesting activities and the feeding on microbial communities (Freckman et al, 1997; Lavelle et al, 2006; Barrios, 2007; Brussaard et al, 2007). Important examples of such services (Haines-Young and Potschin, 2013) are the control of pest and diseases, the decomposition of organic matter and the resulting nutrient cycling and soil formation
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